A quick congratulations to RPISEC, the "resident computer security club and CTF team" at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  Club president Markus Gaasedelen, a computer science student, confirmed a report that popped up on RPI Reddit claiming a top place finish in the 12th Information Security Talent Search, as organized and hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology's Security Practices and Research Student Association. In an email, Gaasedelen (who wrote the account for Reddit) wrote:

Yes we can confirm, we crushed it pretty hard this year.

Here's the account of the event as taken from RPI Reddit:

This past weekend, RPISEC sent one team of five members to compete in the 12th Information Security Talent Searchas organized and hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology's Security Practices and Research Student Association. Some pictures of the event can be found on our twitter feed.

The computer security competition is known for being an 'attack-defend' styled hacking competition. At the start, blue teams are each given a number of vulnerable servers that they must lock down and attempt to keep services up (such as HTTP, DNS, SMTP, SSH, etc) while being attacked throughout the competition by a dedicated red team or even other blue teams. Maintaing service uptime, attacking other teams, and completing various forensics, reverse engineering, and crypto challenges all factor in to the final score calculation.

This year the team consisted of Branden Clark '16, Patrick Biernat '16, Austin Ralls '17, Sophia D'Antoine '15, and Markus Gaasedelen '15. RPISEC placed 1st both at ISTS12 and ISTS11 (last year), and a few other times in years previous.

According to its website, RPI SEC is "an entirely student-run organization that was founded to provide a safe haven for students interested in learning about and exploring the esoteric world of computer security." Also ... their Twitter motto: "Break it. Hack it. Own it."

For more information about the competition, check out this RIT news story. And congratulations RPISEC!