NICC Climbs Higher Across the Competition
The NJIT Information and Cybersecurity Club (NICC), the budding student run organization with a mission to give students real-time, practical experience in information security and cybersecurity, has been rising in the ranks of CTF competitions across the nation and abroad. The club recently placed third out of 12 northeast regional teams in the NCAE Cyber Games, held March 8 by the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE-C).
NICC has gained a foothold among their cybersecurity peers since its inception two years ago as the brainchild of president and co-founder Alfred Simpson ’24, M.S. ‘25. In little time, it has grown in membership and plays a significant role as an event partner for the annual JerseyCTF Competition, a 24-hour capture-the-flag inspired hackathon that will take place March 23-24.
The group’s recent participation in the NCAE Cyber Games saw them rise from sixth to third place over the last year among some of the most prestigious institutions in the northeast region. The team, primarily comprised of members who are either current scholarship recipients or prospective candidates for the elite CyberCorps® Scholarship for Service (SFS) Program as part of the NJIT Secure Computing Initiative, included Maciej Gajda, Noah Jacobson, Justin Tecson, Tomasz Brauntsch, Hamdi Korreshi, Daniel Marriello (SFS), Logan DesRochers (SFS), Janish Suneja, Michael Sluka, and Simpson (SFS).
The remote competition day began at 6:30 a.m. with setting up machine routing and FTP servers. “That was the easy part!” said Simpson.
From there, players engaged in a dual game of CTF and threat hunting to prevent the opposing red team, consisting of representatives from government agencies, teachers and former students, from infiltrating the team’s core infrastructure on compromised machines. Each regional team had a goal of figuring out how the “bad guys” got in, devising a method to stop it, and restoring the config files to achieve the top score against the other schools. (No counter-hacking allowed.)
Gajda and Jacobson were voted most improved player and most valuable respectively by the NICC members.
“Aside from the satisfaction of winning, the event is excellent hands-on training for threat hunting in the real world,” Simpson observed.
The team began practicing in December through a crash course combination of videos, Googling and knowledge obtained from their rigorous academic programs along with participation in an average of two to three CTF competitions … every weekend.
Commitment is paying off. Three of five primary teams are in the CTF top 100 and the other two are close behind. The top team, the G1tc_Gu4rdians headed by Simpson, is ranked No. 25 in the nation out of approximately 6,000 teams. However, the rankings are ever-changing as CTF’s across the country are constantly being waged. When a U.S. event isn’t being played, the rest of the world is holding competitions to benefit every time zone, and ctftime.org acts as the dashboard for any team who is game enough to enter the typically 24-72-hour marathon hackathons.
With NJIT’s own JerseyCTF this coming weekend, Simpson and fellow student coordinators will be working non-stop until its conclusion on March 24.
“Sleep? I’ve barely slept more than a few hours for the past month!” laughed Simpson.
NICC has grown to over 300 members since its founding in September 2022. That is a lot of determination, adrenaline and coffee needed to keep balancing school work, projects, competitions, and whatever fuels NJIT students to exceed their own expectations. But they are always up for a new challenge.
Register for the JerseyCTF Competition March 23-24: https://www.jerseyctf.com/