In its first appearance, the UNO Student Cyber Defense team won a second place in Southwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) in Corpus Cristi, TX . UNO came in a very close second behind defending national champion Texas A&M and placed ahead of big name schools like University of Texas at San Antonio and University North Texas.

The competition was a hurricane evacuation simulation. Teams were given initially two hours to map out and back up a simulated business network with 8 computers running a total of 7 different services. Later, they were asked to rebuild the system's functionality from scratch and to secure the services. Teams were given only 2 hours of Internet access and some basic OS installation CDs. The UNO team was the first to bring services up and won the most important 'services up-time' category with an average up time of 92% (vs. 88% for Texas A&M). A Red Team of security professionals continuously probed the network for vulnerabilities for about 24 hours over the three days of the competition. No substantive breaches occurred on the UNO team's network and all services remained continuously operational. A subsequent scan behind the firewall also did not detect any vulnerabilities.

The team consisted of 4 undergraduate and 2 graduate students from the Computer Science Department and were lead by Dr. Vassil Roussev as a faculty advisor. The team (from left to right): Andrew Cristina, Ryan O'Hara, Andrew Case (captain), Lodovico Marziale, Quentin Mason, William Kaplan.