Update: WWU Cyber Defense Team claims third place at national cybersecurity competition
Updated 4/27/26
WWU's Cyber Defense team claimed third place at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. It is Western's first time standing on the podium and the second time WWU has competed in the national competition.
Dakota State University won first place with the University of Virginia taking home second.
WWU beat out Stanford University, University of Central Florida, DePaul University, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Texas at San Antonio, University of Massachusetts Lowell and University of California Irvine to secure their third-place finish.
Original article posted 4/23/26:
The WWU Cyber Defense team won first place at the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) on March 21 and 22, hosted at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia.
WWU beat out the University of Washington and 2025 champions Oregon State University to claim the top prize for the second time in Western’s history.
The win secures Western a spot to compete in nationals for the first time since 2014.
The Pacific Rim region includes Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with 13 colleges and universities competing at this year’s event.
Western’s PRCCDC team was made up of cybersecurity seniors Clay Molitor, Nick Mayer, Adin Jura and Austin Reyes; cybersecurity juniors Dylan Hopkins, Tori Ulm and Matt Harris; and computer science senior Grayson Koch.
During the competition, teams were given a variety of cloud servers to defend which had been intentionally misconfigured to make them vulnerable to hackers. A group of professional hackers known as the Red Team attempted to break into the servers, and each competing team had to defend 13 computers.
Teams were scored on how well they kept their websites, email servers and other services running, how much personal information they were able to keep away from the hackers, and how well they performed in mini challenges, known as “injects,” sent out during the competition.
Injects included creating a diagram of the team’s network, making a secure password policy and even writing a poem about good security practices.
The team was also scored on how well they managed simulated customer interactions designed to distract the competitors. While trying to keep their data secure, the team had to field purposefully outlandish customer requests, from help killing a spider to removing Russian hackers from their walls.
The competition’s biggest challenges were logistics and technical skills, team captain Clay Molitor said.
“Logistically, the biggest challenge was coordination,” he said. “There are eight of us defending about as many computers. Each computer is running a variety of websites and operating systems. Keeping an eye on what the Red Team is doing is very difficult.”
Technically, the hardest part was working with Microsoft server software, Molitor said.
The team was tasked with working with Windows Active Directory, a software that manages the computer’s users and services.
“It’s a huge piece of software,” Molitor explained. “It’s critical to keep it safe, but we must be careful to not break it.”
The software required to set up services like the mail server and web proxy server also posed a challenge, said Ulm, who helped with customer support and tracking vulnerabilities during the competition.
Despite these challenges, Molitor and Ulm agreed that the team excelled when it came to collaboration and communication.
“As the team captain, I’m most proud of how well our team worked together,” Molitor said. “We did a great job communicating what we worked on and what needed to be done next.”
Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Nationals will be held virtually on April 24 and 25.
To learn more about WWU’s cybersecurity program, visit https://www.wwu.edu/majors/cybersecurity.
Mikayla King, ‘17, covers the College of Science and Engineering and Woodring College of Education for University Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at kingm24@wwu.edu.