Feds, military personnel compete in President's Cyber Cup Challenge
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Michael Harpin, the competition’s section chief at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told Nextgov/FCW that the competition fosters internal recognition and networking that can help spur career growth.
The competition to identify promising cybersecurity talent within the federal government came to a conclusion in mid-April, part of the larger movement to help foster cybersecurity awareness and skill in the existing government workforce.
Artificially Intelligent — a team of four Army servicemembers and one from the Air Force — won the 2024 President’s Cyber Cup Challenge, a five-year-old competition open to federal government and U.S. military personnel.
Michael Harpin, the competition’s section chief at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told Nextgov/FCW that the challenge fosters both internal recognition and networking that can help spur career growth.
“Holding the competition in person over the last two years, after COVID, has been really valuable in just allowing these individuals to meet each other,” he said. “Now they've been able to meet in person and there's a good-natured competitiveness that's grown between them, and also networking amongst them as well.”
Harpin explained that the challenge consisted of a three-round competition model. Tasks the teams needed to solve were modeled as games that simulated best practices in the cybersecurity field, like monitoring internet-of-things traffic, properly setting up routers with internet protocol version 6, and more lighthearted interpretations of cybersecurity challenges, including spaceship-themed problems and a fictional chemical company working with automated systems.
“We just kind of wanted to give them a different immersive environment interface to play with and have fun within the competition, as opposed to some of the standard the regular way we had been delivering challenges leading up to that.”
The spirit of the President’s Cyber Cup Challenge is one of the remedies federal officials have proposed in recent years to help upskill the existing workforce as demand for professionals fluent in cybersecurity for government operations continues to overwhelm the current supply.
Heparin said that CISA’s competition works to demonstrate and cultivate existing, and potentially untapped, reservoirs of talent already within the federal government.
“Being able to show people that it exists here, you know, showing that we have the skill set within carrying out the national security mission…that’s part of it,” he said.