Cyber Security Center
In line with the Center for Academic Excellence goals and to promote cyber defense skills and awareness, Riverside City College, with support from the Riverside Community College District, has established a Cyber Security Center and an Information Security and Cyber Defense educational pathway for students interested in pursuing a career in cyber defense. The mission of the center is to provide access to technology and resources to assist our students in pursuit of a career in cyber defense as well as to provide for staff, faculty and the community at large, resources on information security awareness and online safety for both adults and children.
Location
Our center is located in the Martin Luther King Building, room 205 and is equipped with 27 workstations with Internet access that is isolated from the production network and a variety of security tools including virtual machines where various operating systems can be loaded and studied from a CD perspective in a safe manner. A library of computing and security books are available for use on location.
Cyber Security Club
The Cyber Security Center is also used by our Cyber Security Club for meetings, discussions and various cyber defense projects as well as practice space for competitions such as NCL and WRCCDC. The center is shared by our ACM club and program for coding practice and projects. RCC also hosts CyberPatriot summer camps for high school students to foster interest and learning in cyber defense.
Come join us at MLK 205 from 4:30 - 5:45 PM every Wednesday! Learn more about the exciting world of Cyber Security!
Why Compete in Cyber Competitions?
Only so much theoretical knowledge can be learned through book learning and classes. As with any other jobs, having the technical and decision making know-hows just isn't enough. You've got to practice responding to situations to sharpen your skills and help you elevate your game. Cyber competitions hones and prepares students or even professionals for these on-the-job situations. That's why there are many cyber security competitions all year round such as, the most popular format, Capture the Flag (CTF). CTF events have different formats including jeopardy and attack-defense, or a mixture of both. Some well-known cyber competitions are National Cyber League (NCL), DEF CON, and CyberPatriot.
(NCL) National Cyber League
NCL provides an ongoing educational training ground for all levels, as well as it's a recruiting tool for companies in the cyber security field. All activities in NCL are built around learning objectives. During the 2019 Spring Competition, two representatives from RCC ranked in the top 100 out of 3607 competitors and at the same time the entire team placed 35 out of 627.