ICSSP team places 4th at Midwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

Students at the The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are gaining recognition in cybersecurity through strong competition results and a team they built from the ground up.

A team from the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) recently placed third in the Illinois Cyber Competition, advancing to the Midwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), where they placed fourth overall. Judges highlighted the team’s strong performance, including an 84% response rate on injects and high rankings in incident detection.

A big part of this success comes from SIGPwny’s Purple Team, a student-led group focused on hands-on cybersecurity training. The team was started in Fall 2024 by Ronan Boyarski and Michael Khalaf to give students hands on experience in a field that can be hard to break into.

“We started Purple Team in Fall of 2024 as a combination of practical offensive and defensive cybersecurity training designed to address limited support for studying areas like penetration testing and incident response,” said Boyarski.

Instead of just learning concepts, students on the team practice through simulations, training sessions and competitions. Over time, this approach has helped the team grow quickly and compete at a high level.

Khalaf highlighted how much the team has already accomplished.

“Purple Team at SIGPwny is Illinois’s premier competitive tactical cyber defense team,” he said. “Our involvement in developing it helped put UIUC back on the national stage of the collegiate cyberspace.”

Both students also pointed to ICSSP as a major part of their journey. The program, supported by the National Science Foundation, helps prepare students for careers in cybersecurity and connects them with research and professional opportunities.

Khalaf credited Associate Professor Masooda Bashir from the School of Information Sciences for her role in guiding students in the program.

“Professor Masooda Bashir selected these scholarship recipients in all current and past cohorts based on commitment, experience, and promise to the US federal government,” he said. “Her vote of confidence in scholars like Ronan and I not only provided us a clear path forward for our lives, but it rightfully placed us in the pipeline to keep the United States cybersecurity workforce competitive and exemplary today.”

The team has also been supported by the Information Trust Institute (ITI), where faculty members like Casey O’Brien and Matthew Luallen have played an important role in mentoring students and supporting hands-on cybersecurity work.

While competitions have brought attention, Boyarski explained that they are just one part of the bigger picture.

“Competitions are just another method of training designed to further our mission of building proficiency in this space and having fun while doing it,” he said.

As the team’s founders prepare to graduate, they see what they’ve built as something that will continue to grow.

“As we graduate, we're leaving this university with an asset it will utilize in the coming years,” Khalaf said.

With strong student leadership and support from faculty and programs like ICSSP, Illinois is building a lasting presence in cybersecurity.

Grainger College Affiliations

Masooda Bashir is the director of Social Sciences in Engineering Research within The Grainger College of Engineering. She is also an associate professor within the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Information Trust Institute. Additionally, she is a adjunct assistant professor within the department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering.