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Students from the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) went from wildcard to winners of the global cybersecurity competition the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC). A six-person team from ICS student club Cyber@UCI was named 2026 CPTC Global Champions at the CPTC 11 Global Finals held January 9-11, 2026, at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York.
CPTC is a global cybersecurity competition focused on cyber offense and penetration testing (pentesting), which is a simulated cyberattack on a system network or application in order to help organizations identify and repair weaknesses. Teams of college students serve as mock third-party security consultants and perform the activities a real-world security assessment would involve. This includes a vendor assessment and going through an actual pentest against a fictional company’s network infrastructure and servers.
During the global competition, the ICS team was able to find 48 vulnerabilities in the organization’s environment; delivered a 120-page report containing all findings and recommendations; and presented their results to a simulated C-suite of RIT staff, industry professionals, and Bob Kalka, a global leader of security at IBM.
The team first competed in the Southern California regionals November 1-2, 2025, at Cal Poly Pomona, where they battled against teams from other schools in the region, including UCLA and Cal State Fullerton, and earned second place. This qualified the team as a wildcard for the CPTC global competition. There they faced off against competitors, including Stanford, BYU, UMass Amherst, and Princess Sumaya University of Technology.
“I’m incredibly proud of the Cyber@UCI CPTC team for winning the CPTC Global Finals,” said Habiba Farrukh, assistant professor of computer science, who served as faculty coach. “Competing against all regional champions, they came out on top, which speaks volumes about their skill, preparation, and teamwork.”
The team leaders were computer science students Drew Levy and Dhruv Kandula. Members also included computer science students Andy Gu, Eddie Zhu and Colin Harrison, as well as Alex Loan, computer science and engineering student.
Cyber@UCI previously competed in CPTC, but this was the team’s first time back after about three years. All team members were new to the competition.
“Last spring, Steven Ngo, president of Cyber@UCI, reached out to me asking if I would be interested in reforming a CPTC team, which the school had once competed in, to little success,” said Levy. “We organized several weeks of drills and tryouts to teach security topics to students who have never received formal cybersecurity education and chose dedicated members to represent our school. Our student lead team trained throughout the year studying web application exploitation, Windows Active Directory security, and practiced technical writing and presenting.”
Levy appreciated the support for the team’s efforts, “I want to give a huge shoutout to our coach, Habiba Farrukh, our mentor Ryan Krause who gave us insight into professional pentesting methodology, and Dean Marios Papaefthymiou for providing support for our team. I also want to thank the CPTC 11 organizers for putting on such a great event and other competitors for making CPTC so memorable.”
– Tonya Becerra