OPSWAT Provides Network Protection Tools to Students in National Cyber Defense Competition

April 5, 2011 - PRLog -- OPSWAT is sponsoring the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) and contributing its Metascan Ultra and MetaDefender for Secure Access (MD4SA) software to the competitors. These technologies will help the students in their mission to manage and protect a simulated commercial network from outside threats.

The NCCDC, to be held April 8-10 in San Antonio, TX, is hosted by the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio and brings together the regional winners from Colleges and Universities across the country. Teams of eight undergraduate and graduate students compete to maintain existing servers and Internet services, detect and respond to outside threats and perform common business-related tasks. Each team is scored on their execution of these objectives while balancing security against business needs. The competition exposes students to challenges they will encounter in corporate IT environments upon graduation.

“We are happy to be helping the next generation of IT security professionals discover new tools for protecting networks,” commented Benny Czarny, CEO, OPSWAT. “We hope that our contribution will help the students fully demonstrate their technical abilities.”

As part of their sponsorship of the event, OPSWAT will provide its Metascan Ultra and MD4SA technologies to the teams for use during the competition. Both Metascan and MD4SA are multi-scanning products from OPSWAT that use multiple anti-malware engines to simultaneously scan for threats. Because no anti-malware engine is perfect all of the time, using multiple engines significantly increases the chance of detecting a particular threat. Students will have the option to implement OPSWAT’s software to help them maintain the health and performance of their networks.

Metascan is a development toolkit that can be easily configured to integrate multi-scanning technology into an existing solution. MD4SA, which is powered by Metascan, uses five anti-malware engines to scan endpoints for key loggers, viruses and other malware prior to a network, web or server login. This adds an extra layer of network protection without the draining of system resources associated with a full system scan. This balance will be important to the NCCDC competitors in their efforts to optimize both security and functionality.

“The students competing in NCCDC will benefit from having OPSWAT as a sponsor this year. OPSWAT’s multi-scanning tools will add a new dimension of network protection capabilities to the competition,” said Jessica Archer from NCCDC.

For more information about OPSWAT, Metascan and MD4SA, please visit www.opswat.com. For more information about the NCCDC, please visit www.nationalccdc.com.

About OPSWAT
Founded in 2002, OPSWAT is the industry leader in software management SDKs, interoperability certification and multiple-engine scanning solutions.  With both software manageability and multi-scanning products, OPSWAT offers simplified and comprehensive SDKs that reduce time and costs for your engineering and testing teams. OPSWAT delivers: OESIS Framework, an open development framework that enables software engineers to develop products that manage thousands of third-party software applications; Multi-scanning products including Metascan, MetaDefender for Media, MetaDefender Threat Analyzer and MetaDefender for Secure Access, which optimize several anti-malware engines to scan for viruses simultaneously; Filterbit, a free online demo of MetaDefender Threat Analyzer for scanning suspicious files; and AppRemover, a free utility that enables the complete uninstallation of antivirus applications.

About the NCCDC
The NCCDC is a three day event and the first competition that specifically focuses on the operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing “commercial” network infrastructure. The event gives students a chance to test their knowledge in an operational environment and network with industry professionals who are always on the lookout for up-and-coming engineers. The NCCDC is an annual event that began in 2006 and the championship of the CCDC competition events at the state level. Up to 600 people compete in the CCDC state events, with more than 60 competitors making it to the NCCDC championship competition.