The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was tasked with holding a cybersecurity competition for the federal cyber workforce. It chose to partner with the SEI to develop and run the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition, a national cyber competition that identifies, recognizes, and rewards the best cybersecurity talent in the federal executive workforce. In six years more than 8,000 people have taken part in the President’s Cup. In that same time span nearly 4,000 help-desk tickets concerning questions with challenges/the platform/registration, etc., were created to support the President’s Cup. While designing high-level challenges is the most important part of a cybersecurity competition, having a support team that can process and resolve competitors’ concerns in a timely fashion is a critical part of making a cybersecurity competition successful. In this post we present lessons learned from six years of hosting President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competitions including the necessity of competition support staffing.
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