The Student:
HARRISON KEATING, 22
UCF Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition Team competitor and captain
University of Central Florida, Orlando
Lego robotics first attracted Harrison Keating to the world of tech. By age 12 he was building websites, and a couple years later making video games. In high school he heard about CyberPatriot, a cybersecurity competition: “We put a team together and none of us really knew what we were doing.” Still, Keating met students with similar interests as his own interest in cybersecurity grew. When he learned there was a collegiate version of the contest, the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, he went to its website, clicked on past winners, and the University of Central Florida popped up the most. “That is how I ended up at UCF.”
“A lot of people who get into cyber like hacking and breaking things, but for me, I just like building and making things. Software brings so much power to the individual,” the St. Augustine native explains, noting that mobile phones today are more powerful than the computers that got us to the moon. “There’s just so many possibilities.”
Keating majored in computer science as an Honors College student and graduated this spring. He will embark on his cybersecurity master’s degree at UCF this fall. He landed his first security engineering role as an intern, and this past summer he worked in network engineering for IBM Research. Keating is a captain on the 29-member UCF Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition Team that has won 12 national championships since 2014.
“There’s a trap a lot of people can fall into in education in tech fields where you do a lot of theoretical learning and don’t spend enough time hands-on with real systems. The competitions serve as a great way to benchmark your skills and say OK, what happens when I’m actually the hands on the keyboard and there’s an attacker on the other side trying to get in. You can either stop them or you can’t, so it’s a great practical test of skills.”
Some competitions let students be the attacker — for example, last year’s Hack the Building 2.0: Hospital Edition backed by the National Security Agency. And, yes, competitions attract the right attention: “I've had a few friends get job offers from interviewing during a competition,” Keating says.
Keating and 405 other UCF students are members of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club @ UCF, unofficially known as Hack@UCF. “It’s just a lot of students who are really passionate about this stuff and care about teaching and passing that knowledge down.” The competition team members are part of the non-profit club, and the club holds its own workshops and competitions, too.
“I think one of our coolest things is we’re the only club on campus that has their own room,” adds Keating.
Walk into the 970-sq.-ft. Lockheed Martin Cyber Innovation Lab and you’ll see a big screen to teach workshops. It also has its own student-built and student-run private cloud and cyber range, giving club members a secure environment to practice their craft and experiment with new techniques. “These kids are crazy — the kind of work that they’re doing would not be allowed for entry-level people in a real company,” says UCF Computer Science Professor Tom Nedorost. “They’re doing stuff that you’d be doing as a mid-level or a senior engineer — just for fun. And then they provide access to everybody in the club.”
One reason for the university’s success in cybersecurity competitions is that Nedorost, who coaches the competition team, plans for continuity by keeping track of which students are close to graduation and training younger students to replace them in their particular skill sets. He also notes that he has a big pool to recruit from: more than 13,000 UCF engineering students.
Members of the competition team have jobs guaranteed before they graduate — sometimes multiple offers — says Nedorost, who helped start the team and club in 2012 as a new professor. Because of their competition experience, they are typically hired directly into mid-level positions as cyber analysts, consultants, penetration testers or vulnerability researchers paying well over six figures to start, and within two to three years, they move into positions with salaries exceeding $200,000.
UCF’s Cyber- Competition Dynasty
- 12 national championships since 2014
- 142 top 3 finishes since 2013, including 88 first-place finishes
UCF is a six-time winner of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, the largest collegiate-level cyber contest in which student teams running a fictional company defend it against a variety of cyber attacks similar to what real-world companies face. UCF is a four-time national champion of the U.S. Department of Energy CyberForce Competition. UCF students also compete in “Capture the Flag” virtual competitions, which attract thousands of teams. For these competitions, UCF is ranked 29th out of 5,456 teams in the U.S. and 236th out of 40,868 teams globally.
Winners Circle: Where are they now?
Here are a few UCF Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition Team alumni who earned UCF bachelor’s degrees and/or master’s degrees in computer science fields since 2020 and were on a national champion team:
- Christopher Fischer of Melbourne is a Cyber Engineer II with Raytheon CODEX.
- Michael Roberts of Oviedo is a Senior Manager of Product Security with Abbott.
- David Maria of Weston is a Senior Consultant with CrowdStrike.
- Christopher Velez of Northeast Florida is a Threat Intelligence & Incident Response Analyst with Southwest Airlines.
In Demand
- 572,392: Unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the United States. Current cybersecurity professionals fill only 72% of the need.
- $89,000: Average entry-level cybersecurity salary that can quickly escalate above $100,000 with some experience.