Many collegiate football and basketball players are accustomed to the media spotlight, but at the University of South Florida, a different group of student-athletes have made headlines with a star turn in a documentary film.
Released last fall, "The Making of a Defender" chronicles a year in the life of USF's competitive cybersecurity team as they put their hacking and counter-hacking skills to the test. The CyberHerd, as the team is known, go from barely qualifying for a regional competition to winning first place at DEF CON 33, a convention in Las Vegas featuring more than 90 teams from around the world. The field included a squad of professionals from Singapore's Cyber Security Agency who'd won the past three competitions.
Cyber Florida, a state-run agency based at USF whose mission includes cybersecurity education, research and outreach, funded the documentary, hiring Two Stories Media, a Tampa-based video production company, to make it. One of the team's leaders, junior Michelle McAveety, joined CyberHerd just as production got underway.
"It was a lot to take in," she says. "I'd never been part of anything like CyberHerd, and definitely not featured in a documentary! It was intimidating at first, but I knew I was part of something special, seeing the attention Cyber Florida was putting on us and how much they were investing in our team."
McAveety says she became more comfortable as the shoot continued because it reinforced "how important all this work that we're doing is."
CyberHerd coach Marbin Pazos Revilla, an assistant professor at USF's Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, concurs.
"It's rewarding for our team to have this exposure and recognition," he says. "But beyond that, these students will eventually be defending our nation. These are students who will become professionals and provide the defenses that protect our infrastructure and services that we depend on ... and that's significantly different than being just an athlete."
"The Making of a Defender" depicts how cyber-athletes develop essential skills for the workplace. In some events, they're part of a "red team" trying to penetrate a system's defenses. In others, they're the "blue team" responsible for defending against those attacks. The competitions have a set time limit, making tasks even more stressful.
In one pivotal scene, a CyberHerd member's computer becomes compromised by a red-team attack, rendering it useless for a large stretch of the competition.
"We see that a lot," McAveety says. "They hit us hard. They pull out all the stops and do whatever they can to make sure we have a difficult time securing our systems. That makes it really high pressure, but at the same time makes it a valuable learning experience."
"The Making of a Defender" can be streamed on YouTube.