The NSA sponsors an annual Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) to raise awareness of and help develop cyber defense skills in our armed forces. This is the story of how the United Stated Merchant Marine Academy, the smallest of the five undergraduate service academies, has managed to hold its own, and even win one year, in head-to-head competition against other well-funded and well-organized federal academies from cyber attacks by the NSA Red Team with borrowed equipment, no funding, and no computer science program. The talk will cover thoughts on keeping your network manageable if you don't have an army of administrators and a DoD budget. We may also make fun of the Coast Guard Academy.
<strong>Efstratios L. Gavas</strong> is an Assistant Professor at the United Stated Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY where he has been building the cyber defense program for the last four years. He screens prospective students by dropping them off in Manhattan with an Eee PC, a BackTrack distro, and a swiss army knife to see who makes it back to campus alive. He is also concurrently working on his Ph.D at Polytechnic Institute of New York University where he has researched: hardware trojan detection, hardware control-flow obfuscation, RFID security, privacy and anonymity, computer forensics and is aggravating his advisor because he can't settle on a topic. He is a National Science Foundation Federal Cyber Scholarship Recipient. One day he hopes to sail around the world, or build a autonomous boat to do it for him