Students from Carnegie Mellon University Win 2019 Deloitte Foundation Cyber Threat Competition
College students representing 15 universities compete at Deloitte University for a real-world challenge of cyber and business complexity.
Four students from Carnegie Mellon University won the 2019 Deloitte Foundation Cyber Threat Competition. Team members Karttik Panda, Veera Nandiraju, Sanika Suwant and Nishith Yadav each received $2,000 in scholarship money. Carnegie Mellon University teams have competed since the competition began five years ago, and always rank amongst top performing teams. This is the first win for the university.
The competition consisted of three rounds over the last two month that culminated Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019. The first round was an online cyber competency quiz and the second was an online technical challenge. In both, students competed individually. Then, the top qualifying student competitors from each university were invited to Deloitte’s leadership center, Deloitte University in Westlake, Texas, to represent their schools as teams and compete in the final round — the Cyber Wargame event. In this competition, the teams faced off during a two-day challenge that simulated a real corporate environment during a cyber-attack. Teams had to evaluate the information available and return a response plan recommendation to a fictitious team of corporate executives, made up of Deloitte cyber professionals.