UMGC Cybersecurity Team Earns Top Finishes in National Competitions

Building on early success with back-to-back wins

The CrowdStrike CTF performance set the tone for the weeks that followed. On February 18, UMGC secured first place and a perfect score in the World Wide Technology (WWT) F5 CTF Beta Test, followed by a second-place finish-also with a perfect score-the next day in WWT's Haystack Hunt for Indicators of Compromise Challenge. On February 27, the team added another first-place finish at the BloomCON 0x0A CTF competition.

UMGC continued to perform at the highest national levels at Hack the Madness in March, advancing to the Elite Eight and narrowly missing further advancement after a tightly contested match against Cornell University. The team closed out the month with a strong run of first-place finishes. On March 26, it took top honors at the virtual Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (MACCDC) Hack the Box CTF, an event hosted by UMGC. The momentum continued on March 27 with a first-place finish at the WWT Zscaler CTF Beta Test, followed by another victory at the inaugural Maryland CTF Competition, hosted by the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) on March 28.

Together, these early 2026 results reflect the strength of UMGC's applied learning model, where students gain technical, operational, and collaborative experience under realistic competitive conditions. As cybersecurity threats grow in complexity and scale, UMGCs focus on experiential learning is designed to help students prepare for and make an immediate contribution in the cybersecurity workforce.