Recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified the need to encourage hands-on learning throught cybersecurity competitions to address a shortage of skilled cyber defenders. Likewise, in 2019, Executive Order 13870 addressed the need to identify, challenge, and reward the United States government’s best cybersecurity practitioners and teams across offensive and defensive cybersecurity disciplines. Well-developed cybersecurity competitions offer a way for government organizations to fulfill that order. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has been working with the DHS Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to bring unique cybersecurity challenges to the federal cyber workforce. This blog post highlights the SEI’s experience developing cybersecurity challenges for the President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition and general-purpose guidelines and best practices for developing effective challenges. It also discusses tools the SEI has developed and made freely available to support the development of cybersecurity challenges. The SEI technical report 'Challenge Developmment Guidelines for Cybersecurity Competitions' explores these ideas in greater detail.
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