National Cyber League

The NCL is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce. All participants play the games simultaneously during Preseason, Individual Game and Team Game. NCL allows players of all levels to enter. Between easy, medium and hard challenges, students have multiple opportunities to really shine in areas as they excel. The NCL challenges are based on the CompTIA Security+™ and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)™ performance-based exam objectives and include the following content: Open Source Intelligence, Scanning, Enumeration and Exploitation, Password Cracking, Traffic Analysis, Log Analysis, Wireless Security, Cryptography, and Web Application Security. High School students benefit from the NCL by getting an early jump-start in the pursuit of cybersecurity skills. Experience has shown that high school students achieve great satisfaction in competing against students at the collegiate level as they prepare either for further education or the workplace. Collegiate students benefit because the NCL competition is closer to workplace experience over that of formal education by stressing application over theory. The NCL also helps students train for other collegiate level competitions such as the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition and prepares them for the workplace.