The Global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) started small, in a classroom at RIT. Bill Stackpole, a professor of Defensive and Offensive Security, saw a gap between book learning and the real world that he wanted to close in order to set his students up for success after graduation. He started building a competition. Taking this classroom competition, he enlisted the help of many dedicated volunteers, spanning industry professionals, academics, and sponsors who worked tirelessly to give that same experience to all students interested in the computing security field.

Going into it’s ninth season, the competition has more than 100 schools that compete across 7 global regions. From San Francisco to Dubai these top cybersecurity students gain real-life experience that will benefit their eventual work environments.

To give an idea of the level of this competition; during both the 2020-2021 and the 2019-2020 competition cycles, some teams had more than 100 students attend tryouts. During the Global Finals, competitors discovered zero-days in commercial technologies, registered them as CVEs, and designed a patch for the most critical vulnerability. Many students get co-op and career job offers as a direct result of the Sponsor Faire.