NCGC: The National Cyber Gauntlet Challenge
A Sleeping Giant
In late 2018, I started building a new cybersecurity competition in collaboration with my cofounder, UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training, and its Cognitive Sciences Laboratory.
Our goal was to create a competition that would be accessible to students of all skill levels, and that would showcase the interdependent skillsets of designing, securing, attacking, defending, and forensically investigating network across a variety of domains. For CSL, the goal was to create a competition that would help them collect data on group cognition, and the psychology behind how people learn and interact with cybersecurity challenges.
Unfortunately, the project was put on hold in early 2019 due to the rise of COVID, and ultimately killed by the pandemic. I’m still hopeful that we’ll be able to bring it back to life in the future, but for now, I’m publishing the documents and photos from the project here.
Website
We had an incredibly beautiful website that was designed and built by Whiskey, the co-founder of the NCGC project.
NCGC Master Pitch Deck
This is the slide deck I presented to stakeholders within UCF, as well as to prospective sponsors.
DARPA Pitch Deck
In collaboration with Dr. Stephen Fiore of CSL, Whiskey and I presented this slide deck to DARPA in an attempt to secure funding for the project.
NCGC Sponsorship Guide
This is the sponsorship guide my team put together to help us secure funding for the project. It includes a detailed breakdown of the competition’s structure, as well as a list of the benefits sponsors would receive for supporting the competition.
We managed to raise $100,000 in sponsorship commitments up to the point at which the pandemic placed the project on an indefinite hiatus, which I’m proud of.
Rough Draftts
No great idea comes without a journey through sketches, working models, and prototypes. Here are some of the early drafts of the NCGC project.
Sketching the content and flow of our main pitch deck
Prepping a pitch to the UCF Foundation
Planning out sponsor benefits and tiers