What is CCDC?
The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition puts college students in the role of an IT security team at a simulated company. Your team inherits a corporate network, complete with servers, services, and users, and your job is to keep it running.
That means managing risk, maintaining critical services, responding to business tasks (called injects), and defending against a live Red Team that is actively trying to break into your systems. All at the same time.
It’s not a CTF. There’s no flag to find. You’re running a business under pressure, making real-time decisions about what to prioritize when everything is on fire.
What the Competition Looks Like
Each year, teams step into a unique scenario built around a fictional company. You’ll receive a Blue Team packet before the event that describes the company, its infrastructure, and what’s expected of you.
During the competition, you’ll work with several teams beyond your own:
- Red Team: professional security practitioners acting as your adversary. They start attacking at game time with no prior knowledge of your systems.
- White Team: delivers business tasks (injects) and grades your submissions. Think of them as your company’s leadership.
- Orange Team: plays in-world characters like employees, contractors, or customers. They may need help, make requests, or not be who they say they are.
- Black Team: runs the competition infrastructure behind the scenes.
- Green Team: sponsors observing the competition. They’re often hiring, so talk to them.
Scoring
Points come from several areas:
- Services: automated checks monitor whether your critical services are up and functioning. Keep them running.
- Injects: business and technical tasks delivered throughout the competition. These range from writing incident response plans to implementing firewall rules or deploying TLS certificates.
- Orange Team: how you handle interactions with in-world characters is scored. Help the employee reset their password, respond to a customer complaint, or deal with a suspicious contractor request.
Red Team activity costs you points when they successfully compromise your systems. You can recover some of those points by filing detailed incident reports that document what happened and how you responded.
The Path to Nationals
SWCCDC covers Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. The competition has two stages:
- Qualifier: a remote, half-day event. All registered teams compete, and the top 8 advance.
- Regionals: a three-day, in-person event hosted at the University of Tulsa. Teams work from dedicated competition rooms using only SWCCDC-provided equipment.
The regional winner advances to National CCDC in April.
How It Works
Teams are made up of up to eight students and a faculty or staff Coach.
- Winter: Teams register and start practicing
- Late January: Registration closes
- Mid-February: Qualifier event (top 8 advance)
- March: Regional competition in Tulsa, Oklahoma
- April: Regional winner advances to National CCDC
Get Started
New to CCDC? This video walks through how to start a team.
- Team Preparation Guide - National CCDC’s guide to building a team
- Official Rules - Review these before competing
- How to Win CCDC - A community guide by Mubix