[COMPETITION]

Competition

Cybersecurity competitions play a vital role in driving innovation and fostering talent. Cyber@UCI hosts competition teams for members who want to dive deeper and prove themselves against the up-and-coming cybersecurity community.

As of Winter 2026, we have teams for the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC), and Capture the Flags (CTFs). We have also competed in Hivestorm, eCitadel, and the Collegiate Incident Response Competition for Undergraduate Students (CIRCUS). We have major accomplishments at the regional and national levels.

CCDC

The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) is a premier collegiate-level cybersecurity competition in the United States focused on cyber defense and blue teaming. Over 200 teams across different regions compete every year, and we compete in the Western Region against teams from Stanford, Cal Poly Pomona, and many other UCs and CSUs. CCDC is endorsed by the US Congress and sponsored by well-known companies, including RTX, Nightwing, Scale AI, and CrowdStrike, with winners receiving special attention as to recruitment.

In the competition scenario, each collegiate team, also known as the "Blue Team", inherits an identical corporate network and has to secure it against a live team of professional penetration testers and red teamers, alongside maintaining critical services, handling business tasks, and providing customer service.

It is one of the best applied cybersecurity experience you can get in college - competitors become well-rounded individuals who would excel in any security role, may that be system administrators, security engineers, DevOps engineers, pentesters/red teamers, or governance risk and compliance specialists. CCDC competitors also become used to working in stressful situations and working in a tight-knit team to defend against red teamers.

The club was originally founded in 2018 for the sole purpose of putting together a CCDC team, and after two CCDC National appearances in 2021 and 2024, our team became the CCDC National Champions in the 2025.

CPTC

The Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) is another premier collegiate-level cybersecurity competition that Cyber@UCI competes in, with this one focusing on emulating a real-world penetration test engagement against a fictional company and live corporate network. Over 70 schools from 7 regions across the world compete for a shot to attend the Global Finals, held in-person at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. We compete in the Southern California region against teams from Cal Poly Pomona, UCLA, and other UCs and CSUs.

In the 2025-26 season, the student teams conducted a pentest against a fictional cruise operator, and spent multiple workdays probing the competition network for vulnerabilities and writing a professional-level report on their findings to be judged against the other teams. On top of technical knowledge in offensive security, successful teams also demonstrate excellence in client communications, business writing, and on-the-fly thinking to handle business requests/tasks thrown at them in the middle of their assessment.

Our very first team competed in 2022, and our CPTC Team came back from hiatus in the 2025-26 season to take 2nd place in the SoCal CPTC Regionals and 1st place in the 2026 CPTC Global Finals, cementing our team's legacy as global champions.