UIS students earn first place category win during National Cyber League competitions

University of Illinois Springfield Computer Science and Information Systems Security majors earned a first place win the Log Analysis category and finished in the top 10 percent of teams nationwide during the annual National Cyber League (NCL) competitions.

During the regular season, several UIS students ranked highly in the national challenge where they faced more than 2,400 competitors. Steve Berryman of Louisville, Kentucky finished 31st and Bhavyanshu Parasher of Gurgaon, Haryana, India finished 37th placing them both in the top one percent of competitors in the United States.

Team captain Austin Bransky of Marengo, Illinois finished 79th and in the top three percent nationwide.

Overall, the UIS team finished 18th out of 182 teams nationally during the NCL’s postseason tournament. This is the second year that a UIS team has competed in the competition.

“This NCL Season was a huge success and there was improvement across the board for most of our returning members,” said team captain Austin Bransky. “It seems like the competition got a lot tougher compared to past years, which is great as it will force us to improve and innovate the way we compete both as individuals and as a team.”

The NCL was founded in May 2011 to provide an ongoing virtual training ground for participants to develop, practice, and validate their cybersecurity knowledge and skills using next-generation high-fidelity simulation environments.

The competition utilizes certified ethical hacker objectives, such as open source intelligence, traffic and log analysis and wireless security.

For more information, contact Brian-Thomas Rogers at 217/206-8165 or broge2@uis.edu.