It’s kind of like the Olympics of cybersecurity, and the University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno has two top competitors.
The International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC), organized by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, runs Oct. 28 to Nov. 1 in Santiago, Chile, and will bring together teams from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and Oceania. The United States and Canada each field a single team, and Computer Science & Engineering grad student Lloyd Gonzales is on the 30-member 2024 U.S. Cyber Team.
He also recently qualified for the 2025 national team, along with Computer Science & Engineering senior Kameron Bettridge. Both men won berths on the team in August, after the U.S. Cyber Combine. Similar to a sports combine, where top athletes are invited to showcase skills to coaches, the U.S. Cyber Open brings together about 130 people to train and compete online.
That means Gonzales and Bettridge both will compete at the 2025 ICC, but only Gonzales — who qualified for the 2024 team in 2023 — competes in the 2024 ICC.
“The real joy of being on the U.S. Cyber Team is the opportunity to work with some of the smartest, coolest people I’ll ever have the opportunity to meet,” Gonzales said. “Yes, being able to represent the United States brings me pride, but it’s the chance to learn from others and solve interesting problems that I value the most.”
Gonzales started participating in cyber competitions, which present problems around web security, hacking and other cybersecurity issues as a high school senior in 2021.
“I just thought it was a cool little set of challenges,” Gonzales said.
After joining the University that fall, he competed with the on-campus ÁùºÏ±¦µä Cyber Club in the National Cyber League, a cybersecurity contest for students.
“The joy and pain of the National Cyber League is that you get to poke holes in everybody’s arguments and figure out solutions together, all under time pressure,” Gonzales said. “It turns out that I really enjoyed the problem-solving process.”
Gonzales, who is in his final year of the College of Engineering’s accelerated BS/MS program, is also researching novel methods to develop training materials for digital forensics, which combines cybersecurity and sleuth work.
“I think of myself as a software engineer who happens to like cybersecurity,” he said. “I don’t care what I do in industry as long as it’s interesting.”
In it to win it
Bettridge, on the other hand, got hooked on the thrill of competing. He waded into the sea of cybersecurity contests as a freshman, when also he participated in National Cyber League.
“They had a gym (a training environment to prepare for competition) that had challenges and write-ups,” Bettridge said. “I immediately got hooked and solved all of the challenges in the gym and tried my best to learn it all — it was new hobby for me.”
Bettridge placed 57th out of 6,400 students in his first competition, fueling his interest. Originally pursuing a double major — band and computer science — he eventually switched to just computer science with a minor in cybersecurity and math.
And he couldn’t get enough. Besides competing with the ÁùºÏ±¦µä Cyber Club, Bettridge participates on an independent cybersecurity team called “thehackerscrew.” On the team, he specializes in web application exploitation or, as he said, “essentially hacking and breaking into websites, as that is the category I am best at.”
Lucky for us, he’s putting his problem-solving powers to good use on U.S. Cyber Team.
