Purdue Fort Wayne cybersecurity team finishes season with No. 14 national ranking; highest spot of any university in Indiana

One of the nation’s highest-ranked teams in a cybersecurity competition that just concluded was made up of six computer science majors at Purdue University Fort Wayne.

During the National Cyber League’s spring 2024 season, Purdue Fort Wayne’s first team finish 14th out of 1,034 total squads who participated. That was the highest place of any university in the Indiana, and among the top 2% of all teams taking part in this biannual competition. The Cyber Power Rankings released Friday is a list generated by Cyber Skyline in partnership with the NCL.

According to NCL, its competitions enable students to prepare and test themselves against practical cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce, such as identifying hackers from forensic data, pentesting – an authorized simulated attack performed on a computer system to evaluate its security – auditing vulnerable websites, recovering from ransomware attacks, and more. NCL describes itself as a community and virtual training ground that allows students to develop and demonstrate their technical cybersecurity skills so they may bridge the gap from curriculum to career.

“This achievement not only showcases our students’ highly demanded cybersecurity skills, but it also highlights our university's competitiveness on a national level,” said Adolfo Coronado, chair of the Department of Computer Science. “Competitions like these are valuable opportunities for our computer science majors to prove to themselves and others that they’re ready to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and apply it to scenarios they’ll see throughout their careers. That’s important.”

The spring season included an individual competition held April 5-7, and a team competition April 19-21. Of those PFW undergraduates who were ranked individually, senior Sean Tierney was 41st out of 3,960 competitors. Joining him on PFW’s first team were fellow seniors Neal Birchfield, Luke Bushur, Tyler Delagrange, and Ronit Patel, along with freshman Maxwell Klema. Prior to this season, the highest a PFW team had ever finished on the Cyber Power Rankings was 38th during the fall 2023 campaign.

A second team from PFW finished a respectable 229th this spring in what was a first go-round for members of its roster.

PFW competitors acknowledged the support of multiple faculty members in the College of Engineering, Technology, and Computer Science who advised them this academic year.

For additional information, contact Geoff Thomas at [email protected] or 260-437-7657 (mobile).

Members of PFW’s second team competing this season included sophomores Ajinkya Naik, Sabene Rizvi and Brian Waltz, along with freshman Ojas Talgaonkar.

In addition to Tierney (#41), other PFW competitors ranked individually were Patel at #317, Klema at #397, Bushur at #505, Waltz at #673, and Birchfield at #688.