Cybersecurity Club
What is the College of Charleston Cybersecurity Club?
College of Charleston’s Cybersecurity Club is a student-led, student-run group within the Computer Science department that focuses on information security and privacy. We hope to fill gaps in the existing curriculum regarding basic networking and infosec, all while preparing members for real-world scenarios and allowing for sharing of experiences and local expertise.
When does the College of Charleston Cybersecurity Club meet and what do we do?
Our club meets each week in order to develop our skills, knowledge and understanding of the many different aspects of security, ranging from simpler topics such as network enumeration and command-line functions to more complex topics such as systems administration, hashing, steganography, and firewall policy. We hope by covering a wide range of topics within the overall cybersecurity umbrella we can cultivate new skilled professionals who are experts in these fields.
Formal meetings are held every Tuesday during the academic semester in Harbor Walk East (generally in the first floor rec room/flex room, HWEA 105F) from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM (this is flexible based on the topic of the meeting) to both provide both Learning and Application sections to each meeting.
The Learning portion of the meeting will be either existing club members or outside mentors brought in doing mini-seminars on the topic planned for the meeting, while the Application portion will be a chance for hands-on testing and skills-building related to said topic (so for example- a day on Firewalls would have a lecture on it and then a hands-on demo). We intend to cater to both beginners and those with more advanced skillsets, so all are welcome.
Additionally, we compete in 2 major security competitions each year- in the fall, we participate in the more offensive security-oriented National Cyber League CTF (an online-based CTF held nationwide, with accessibility for all skill levels), and in the Spring we compete in the Palmetto Cyber Defense Challenge- an 8-hour event we practice for well in advance where a team selected from our club attempts to secure a mock business network from a ‘Red Team’ of professional penetration testers while keeping up with business requests. As of this past semester, we are the title holder for PCDC and will be the defending champs in 2018.
Do I have what it takes to be a member?
Although our club primarily consists of CS, CIS, CITA, or Data Science students, all students from any major are welcome to come join, participate, and learn alongside us. We’ve made a major effort to tool our meetings to be effective for both diehard security wonks and novices alike, so all are welcome and wanted! For those students who are enrolled here at the college and would like to join, here is a link to our Slack channel, where our most up-to-date info is always available and we almost always have someone online to talk to: http://cofcsecurity.slack.com.
We hope more students will come join us and help spread awareness of the imperative need for everyone to become more skilled when it comes to information security.