CCSO just wrapped up our second Red v. Blue Competition, which I organized this year.
What It Is #
Red v. Blue is a live blue team competition — teams go head-to-head, scored on service uptime, incident response submissions, and business and technical injects, all while an active red team works against every team’s environment for the entire event. Learning defensive concepts in a classroom is one thing; applying them when services are actively going down and alerts are firing in real time is a completely different skill, and that gap is exactly what this event is built to close.
Growing the Program #
This year’s event featured a team from Penn State Harrisburg for the first time. The goal is to keep expanding — more Commonwealth campuses next, then statewide, and eventually national.
Running It #
Aiden Johnson and Isabella Masso handled infrastructure, and Nicklaus Giacobe and Matt Ruff served as our Orange Team, keeping score and adjudicating disputes. The red team went all-out to make it a real challenge for every team on the blue side.
Organizing this instead of competing in it was a different kind of pressure — you’re not defending a network, you’re making sure the event itself holds together while thirty-plus people hammer on infrastructure you built. It went well, and I’m already thinking about what to change for next year.