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Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition

Education Through Competition

CPTC focuses on training and evaluating the activities teams are likely to perform during a real-world penetration testing engagement.

 

At its heart, CPTC is a bit different from several other collegiate Cybersecurity competitions. Instead of defending your network, searching for flags, or claiming ownership of systems, CPTC focuses on mimicking the activities performed during a real-world penetration testing engagement conducted by companies, professional services firms, and internal security departments around the world.

Interested in helping us build, design, and create the competition? Let us know here, development is in full swing!

Our Mission

Use competition to address the cybersecurity skills gap by educating college students in technology, communication, and collaboration.

The Global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) started small, in a classroom at RIT. Bill Stackpole, a professor of Defensive and Offensive Security, saw a gap between book learning and the real world that he wanted to close in order to set his students up for success after graduation. He started building a competition. Taking this classroom competition, he enlisted the help of many dedicated volunteers, spanning industry professionals, academics, and sponsors who worked tirelessly to give that same experience to all students interested in the computing security field.

Going into it’s ninth season, the competition has more than 100 schools that compete across 7 global regions. From San Francisco to Dubai these top cybersecurity students gain real-life experience that will benefit their eventual work environments.

To give an idea of the level of this competition; during both the 2020-2021 and the 2019-2020 competition cycles, some teams had more than 100 students attend tryouts. During the Global Finals, competitors discovered zero-days in commercial technologies, registered them as CVEs, and designed a patch for the most critical vulnerability. Many students get co-op and career job offers as a direct result of the Sponsor Faire.

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The 2021-22 competition theme is Industrial Food Manufacturing and Sales for Le Bon Bon Croissant, a fictitious global bakery & confectionery who operates their own retail stores. We announced this at the Global Finals of 2021 so students can build expertise in manufacturing and retail technologies.

Infrastructure Themes by Year
CPTC9 (2023-2024): People Moving (Air and Rail)
CPTC8 (2022-2023): Hotel and Hospitality
CPTC7 (2021-2022): Food Manufacturing and Retail
CPTC6 (2020-2021): Energy
CPTC5 (2019-2020): Finance
CPTC4 (2018-2019): Transportation (Ride Share)
CPTC3 (2017-2018): Managed Elections
CPTC2 (2016-2017): Hospital
CPTC1 (2015-2016): Generic Corporation