Members of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Cybersecurity Club participated in the Hack the Building 2.0: Hospital Edition hackathon on April 4–7.
Five members of the club—president Malcolm Holden, secretary Meghan Schilpp, James Searer, Noah Gratton, and Vincent Emery—joined together to compete remotely in the force-on-force competition.
The event was hosted by the Maryland Innovation and Security Institute’s DreamPort project and the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity program, with the intention of empowering cyber-war fighters to defend the healthcare system.
According to MISI’s website, Hack the Building is a “conglomerate of offensive and defensive teams across the military, government, academia, and industry.” Participants engaged in a fabricated scenario where teams would either attack or defend a hospital’s cybersecurity defenses.
Teams chose whether they’d like to compete as an offensive (red) or defensive (blue) team upon signing up for the competition. IUP’s Cybersecurity Club took a defensive approach as part of the blue team, where they analyzed live system log software to detect and report vulnerabilities.
In addition to exploring cybersecurity solutions for healthcare settings, club members learned about new technologies for cybersecurity analysis which could be explored in future club meetings. “We learned about different tools used in cybersecurity analysis such as Elasticsearch or Splunk,” said Holden. “These are two tools that have appeared before in hackathon competitions we have competed in, so we plan on further exploring these to be better prepared for the competitions to come.”