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Jeff Tjiputra remembers the rough flight to Barcelona, Spain. “One of our team members was afraid to fly, but he toughed it out to help us,” he said. “The turbulence actually solidified his fears, so much so that I worried he wouldn’t fly back.”  

It was late September 2014 and Tjiputra, along with cyber competition teammates Chris Kuehl, Matt Matchen, Jonathan Arneson, Benjamin Heise, Chris McBee and Rob Murphy, carried ������Ƶ (UMGC) to a stunning first-place finish at the Global CyberLympics in Barcelona. The victory established the team as a force in the cybersecurity competition community, a reputation UMGC has continued over the last decade.  

In 2014, Tjiputra, now an adjunct professor at UMGC and vice president of IT and CIO at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, was the director of the UMGC Cybersecurity program and coach of the group of students and alumni that traveled to Barcelona to face the world’s best cybersecurity competition teams. He knew that the chances of a first-place finish were slim.  

Then something unexpected started to unfold. 

“We beat a professional team from the Netherlands whose jobs were actually doing penetration testing, and they had won this event three years before us and then the year after,” said Tjiputra. “We were the only team that ever beat them during that timeframe.” 

In the end, UMGC outscored the Netherlands team by 1,000 points in the final capture-the-flag (CTF) competition. 

“We captured five flags and they captured four,” Tjiputra recalled. “It was an amazing feeling to beat a talented group of global competitors in by far the toughest CTF competition we had ever been involved in.”  

The importance of team dynamics was the main takeaway for team captain Matchen, now employed by Leidos in Stuttgart, Germany as a detection engineering manager at DISA Europe Defensive Cyber Operations. “There can be a lot of pressure as team captain, so it was important to focus on making sure the team had the tools and strategy going in,” he said.  

Looking back, Matchen believes that the event provided him with the offensive and forensic cybersecurity operations mindset that has rounded out his overall experience. “Those perspectives, gained through first-hand experience, enabled me to better articulate and quantify risk areas when implementing security solutions.”  

Heise, now an information security professional, said that the experience pushed the team to the limits of its skills and creativity.  

“I think the skills I honed when training for and during the CyberLympics directly contributed to my success in landing roles in various cybersecurity companies,” he said. “Our camaraderie and teamwork also were instrumental in our success, and the trip to Barcelona with the crew are memories I’ll cherish forever." 

Kuehl, who graduated from UMGC in 2012 with a B.S. in Cybersecurity, is now an offensive security lead with the federal government. He said his time with the cyber competition team was pivotal in shaping his career path. 

“The competitions definitely strengthened my resume and showcased my commitment to continuous learning,” he said. “These experiences enhanced my teamwork and leadership skills, which have been crucial in my career.” 

Tjiputra remembers the intensity of the 2014 CyberLympics final. “There was a lot of back and forth in scoring between us and the team from the Netherlands,” he said. “We were always in first or second place throughout the event but, before the event was over, the organizers shut down the scoreboard, so we didn’t know how we did at the end.” 

In 2012, UMUC finished in second place among eight teams that competed for the world championship and also finished first in the North America regional competition. Five members from 2012 competed in Barcelona. 

The cyber team’s run of success in that time-period also included winning the collegiate and professional divisions of the Maryland Cyber Challenge in 2013. 

Today, under the leadership of Jesse Varsalone, an associate professor of cybersecurity technology who has mentored and coached the team since 2015, UMGC continues to rack up high-profile victories on the national and international stage.   

Competitions contain real-world tasks that professionals perform every day. To promote the skills-building that competitions offer, students at UMGC now can earn three credits by joining individual and team competitions, attending weekly meetings and working on cybersecurity skills to increase their marketability to employers. 

“The ability to earn credits will encourage students to join the team and further prepare to meet the demands of the workforce,” said Varsalone.  

The UMGC cybersecurity competition team now ranks No. 1 in the United States and among the top five worldwide on the HacktheBox online cybersecurity training platform. Roughly 250 U.S.-based schools and 1,000 universities around the world compete on the cybersecurity upskilling, certification and talent assessment software platform.  

In 2015, it took first place in the inaugural DiploHack competition sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. UMGC also won a Silver Award in the 2016 National Cyber Analyst Challenge and finished third in the 2022 Maritime and Control Systems Cybersecurity Con Hack the Port competition. 

Established in 2012, the UMGC cybersecurity team is composed of students, alumni and faculty who compete regularly in digital forensics, penetration testing and computer network defense scenarios that help them gain experience to advance their cybersecurity careers. To prepare for competitions, students detect and combat cyberattacks in the university’s Virtual Security Lab and work through case studies in an online classroom.