Call Security

Step inside the L3Harris Engineering Center and you’re greeted by 12 black and gold championship banners hanging in the atrium. A trophy case, five shelves high, houses glimmering gold cups and team photographs. Another displays more than 40 crystal awards and plaques.

“We are somewhat out of display space,” says Senior Instructor Tom Nedorost ’02MS, coach for the UCF Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition Team and advisor for the university’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Club, better known as Hack@UCF. “I have three more trophies in my office that still need a place to go.”

Perhaps it’s time to invest in a larger trophy case. If history is known to repeat itself, Hack@UCF has a lot more success in store.

The club is arguably the best in the nation at what it does. No other university has won more National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competitions (NCCDC). At last count in early April, Hack@UCF had earned 105 first-place awards — 35 second-place and 30 third-place finishes at regional and national competitions.

Its students and alumni are regularly employed for paid internships and full-time positions fresh out of college at some of the world’s biggest companies — including Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Meta and Microsoft, to name just a few. In a world that is increasingly online — even refrigerators and washing machines are “smart” these days — the evolution of the Internet of Things has expanded our vulnerability with more backdoor access points. On a micro level from our bank accounts and personal health data, to the macro level of national security, if it’s connected to the internet, it can be hacked.

“Cyber touches everything, and that’s why you’re seeing a lot more companies investing in security,” Nedorost says. “We are nowhere near close to saturating the number of opportunities that are out there for our students.”

Joining the Force

Nedorost has been with the club since its inception in Fall 2012, when a senior information technology student, Jonathan Singer ’13, approached him with the idea to form a cybersecurity team to participate in a competition the following spring.

Singer emailed fellow students with a link to the prospective competition, requesting their attendance at an exploratory meeting a few days later.

“I was hoping we’d have at least 12 students there so we could field a full team, and the room ended up packed,” Nedorost recalls. “We decided to form a cybersecurity club for interested students, and it’s just been ongoing and growing ever since.”

The club now boasts more than 450 student members, whom Nedorost describes as highly motivated self-starters committed to upholding Hack@UCF’s legacy of achievement and contributing to the industry even before they graduate. It’s proving to be an industry with a lot of lucrative shoes to fill.

According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, jobs for information security analysts, with a median salary of $120,360, are expected to grow 32% from 2022 to 2032.

“I’ve seen peers who were in the same classes with me — we have the same degree, but I was in the club and they weren’t — and it took them a few years to even get started,” says Christian Campana-Emard ’20, who worked paid summer internships at Northrop Grumman and Microsoft before becoming a cloud security engineer at medical device and healthcare company Abbott Laboratories.

Full STEM Ahead

These Knights’ enthusiasm and interest in the field, combined with their sustained success, have led to some major milestones not just for the club, but the university as a whole.

In 2016 UCF was named a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyberdefense Education by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. In 2019 Lockheed Martin donated $1.5 million for a cyber innovation lab to serve as a practice hub and continuing education space for the team.

In 2021 UCF added a master’s degree in cyber security and privacy, a huge win for the more than 6,000 computer science, information technology and computer engineering undergraduate students enrolled as of Spring 2025. UCF produces one in four engineering and computer science graduates in Florida, according to the State University System.

By day, they’re gaining a solid base of knowledge in how computers work in the classroom. By night, they’re gaining practical experience in the club. It’s a winning combination.

“I think UCF does a good job of teaching core principles, but it’s hard to teach the deeper concepts, and that’s where Hack@UCF comes in,” says Matthew McKeever ’24, a full-time cyber engineer at intelligence solutions company Nightwing and master’s student who was part of the 2024 NCCDC championship squad and selected to the U.S. Cyber Team in 2023. “That experience you get from competing is so valuable. Winning national CCDC is like a year’s worth of work experience on your resume.”

It’s hard to argue with the results.

Encouraged by the university’s trajectory and investment in its foundational STEM and technical programs, Nedorost says he’s confident about the future of Hack@UCF.

And now, with an ever-growing alumni base, he’s got reinforcements to help ensure the next generation of Hack@UCF members are ready to tackle whatever cyber innovations are thrown their way.

“We’re all so thirsty for knowledge about cybersecurity and have a genuine excitement for it,” says Kevin Colley ’18, a staff product security engineer at Tesla. “When one of us figured something out, we’d present it to the rest of the members, so we were always collectively learning together. That doesn’t end with graduation. Alumni come back to teach workshops or provide mentorship to further enrich the new students. It’s a beautiful cycle.”

The following Hack@UCF alumni are a mere sampling of the many Knights impacting the cybersecurity industry today:

Kevin Colley ’18

Staff Product Security Engineer at Tesla
Seattle
B.S. in Computer Science

Colley can only say so much about the work he does every day to help secure Tesla’s electric vehicles and products.

That’s why he was so excited when he received clearance to present at a professional conference last May on one of his most significant Tesla projects to date.

Over the course of six months, Colley developed XPin — a security feature for Linux, software that is part of Tesla’s in-vehicle operating system — which requires any code to be securely verified.

“It enforces that all running code is cryptographically verified by Tesla, blocking an exploitation pattern used in sophisticated cyberattacks,” he says.

UCF played a significant role in Colley’s career success and origin story.

He says the only computer class his small-town high school offered was typing. He craved more and would regularly scour the aisles of Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble for programming books. Then he found Junior Knights. The months-long initiative — managed by UCF computer science faculty members Niels Lobo and Arup Guha — offered complimentary programming classes on Saturdays on the main campus.

The catch was that UCF was about a 2.5-hour drive from Colley’s house.

“I somehow convinced my dad to wake up early every Saturday and drive me,” he says. “After doing the whole course, I convinced him to let me do it a second time.”

Guha oversaw UCF’s highly successful programming team, so when Colley enrolled as a UCF student in 2013, he encouraged Colley to get involved. Colley immediately jumped into both the programming team and Hack@UCF.

He thrived in Hack@UCF as a member of two of the squads that brought home three consecutive NCCDC championships from 2014 through 2016. He also won considerable prizes from other competitions, including a MacBook Pro, thousands of dollars and the opportunity to attend DEF CON, the largest annual hacking and security convention featuring the who’s who of the industry.

He says he still draws from his experience with both clubs in navigating his professional career.

“Any time I encounter some programming challenge in my work, it’s oftentimes that I’m able to at least use the thought process that I picked up from the programming team to help me solve the problem,” he says. “Hack@UCF has been a fantastic resource for me for improving my own cybersecurity skills, and provided me a lot of experience and networking opportunities. But I also gained a skill that others may not expect: public speaking proficiency. Since Hack@UCF is a club that gives weekly technical presentations to hundreds of students, I received really good practice in public speaking.”

And he knows he’s got his dad to thank, too.

“It’s a [wild] ask to drive a five-hour round trip on a Saturday for 12 weeks’ time, but he’s [since] told me [that] when I asked him to take me to Junior Knights, he realized that I never really asked him for pretty much anything,” Colley says. “So he thought about it and decided it would be hard to say no to something that would be very enriching.”

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Jeffrey DiVincent ’23

Security Engineer at Amazon
Seattle
B.S. in Computer Science
M.S. in Cyber Security and Privacy

Jeffrey DiVincent ’23 rejects the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

As a high schooler, DiVincent was known as the techy kid who was good with phones — specifically jailbreaking them, which is removing restrictions on a device’s operating system to gain full access.

“I liked playing with it and figuring out, ‘How can I make this thing do something it’s not supposed to do?’ ” says DiVincent, who is now a Seattle-based security engineer for Amazon. “That’s what makes cybersecurity so interesting to me. The best way to protect a device or system is thinking about all the ways you can break it.”

He committed to attending Hack@UCF’s weekly meetings every Friday as soon as he arrived on campus in 2019. Once the pandemic hit in 2020, those meetings moved online. DiVincent saw a decline in attendance, but he says he instead chose to double down on participating as an active member.

“That decision ended up paying off exponentially,” he says.

He grew from “having a lot to learn” to holding multiple leadership roles within the club, including serving as president his senior year. He also landed internships as an undergrad with Amazon, which ultimately led to the full-time job he scored with the company in 2024.

In his role, he’s responsible for ensuring the security of some of Amazon’s most sensitive applications.

“It’s rewarding to see people impacted by the work I do every day,” he says. “My family, my friends — it’s stuff they use.”

Thanks to UCF’s online courses, he’s simultaneously working toward finishing his master’s degree in cyber security and privacy. And he’s still as committed as ever to Hack@UCF, flying across the country a few times a year to participate in competitions — both as a member of UCF’s Collegiate Cybersecurity Competition team and to help organize Hack@UCF’s own competitions.

“Hack@UCF has shaped the trajectory of my career — one that I’m really passionate about,” he says. “It’s been so integral to my life and many others. We are a professional development club first and foremost. We want to develop a skilled computer security workforce and get these people jobs in the industry, and that’s what I have been most proud to be part of.”

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Sydney Munro ’19

Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco
B.S. in Computer Science

At one point in her life, Sydney Munro ’19 says the prospect of working for a company like Amazon or Google was completely foreign to her. She achieved both before the age of 28.

Munro didn’t have a clear direction in mind when she started on a mathematics path at Broward College in her hometown. But she had a conversation with a friend who was studying computer engineering at UCF at the time, and that got her thinking. When that same friend landed an internship at Microsoft within the next year, Munro was sold.

“If she could do it, I could do it, too. It made it attainable. I thought, ‘Let’s give this a go,’ and pretty much the rest is history,” says Munro, who joined Google in 2021 and recently took a position with the company in San Francisco as a site reliability engineer, working with its cloud system.

Munro transferred to UCF and joined Hack@UCF in 2017. During her time with the club, she competed on UCF’s cybersecurity competition team that placed third at the 2019 Wicked6 Cyber Games in Las Vegas. She also got involved as a mentor for Junior Knights.

She says an internship at Amazon helped open her world and was a game-changer for her schooling and future career.

“My internship at Amazon really prepared me for when I came back to school and took courses like Senior Design,” she says. “All of a sudden, my team is like, ‘Hey, we need to build this app, and we need to host it somewhere.’ Well, I just came from a company that has AWS (Amazon Web Services) as their cloud provider. I know these tools pretty well, so I [knew I could] probably do this. I learned so much, and Amazon was really big [on] informing [me of ] what the rest of my career — so far, at least — would look like.”

As soon as she graduated, she was hired full time as a software development engineer and left for Seattle. She didn’t have any jitters about moving away from the only home she had known to a new city across the country because of the community Hack@UCF had, and continues to provide, today, she says.

“I moved to Seattle with six of my best friends after college because I was in Hack@UCF, and we all got jobs at Amazon and Microsoft,” Munro says. “It was a space where I met people [who] would become coworkers and friends. So while there is that technical and learning aspect of Hack@UCF, I think at its core, it is people — people that you get to do life with.”

Imagine a 5-year-old managing her Type I diabetes by wearing a glucose monitoring sensor. Her parents have peace of mind because they can check on the sensor’s data syncing to their phones in real time. But one day the system crashes, or a hacker messes with the levels and breaks the sensor. Now that very important, potentially life-saving data is compromised.

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Christian Campana-Emard ’20

Cloud Security Engineer at Abbott
Orlando
B.S. in Information Technology

That is what Christian Campana-Emard ’20 works to prevent every day in his role as a cloud security engineer at Abbott Laboratories.

“Our core mission is to protect that data, make sure it’s confidential and also make sure that the infrastructure is working,” he says.

He couldn’t have predicted as a freshman at Winter Springs High School that his decision to join JROTC would eventually land him in the career he’s in today.

In his first year with the program, the group joined a new initiative through the Air and Space Forces Association to sponsor a cyber defense competition team. In his sophomore, junior and senior years, his team advanced to the national finals in Washington, D.C.

He enjoyed the experience so much that he wanted to continue competing in college at an elite level. So he looked up the results of the CCDC, essentially the Super Bowl of these events. UCF, the university practically in his backyard, had won three years in a row.

“So I thought, ‘OK, this is the place,’ ” Campana-Emard says. “I was so inspired.”

He didn’t wait until enrolling to get involved with Hack@UCF, choosing to attend meetings while still in high school. He eventually competed as a member of the club’s CCDC team, winning the southeast regional competition and claiming runner-up nationally in 2018. He also scored three paid internships with Northrop Grumman and Microsoft in consecutive summers.

“Working at Microsoft inspired me to dream big,” he says. “I walked away with the mentality of, ‘If I can do this, then I can do anything.’ ”

He joined Abbott Laboratories in 2021 after spending a year as a software engineer at Capital One, and has been fulfilled by the tangible role he plays in the lives around him.

“There are so many different elements to cybersecurity, and there are jobs where you could build things that you will never see the true benefit of,” he says. “I love what I do because I don’t have to imagine the possibility of the impact. I can see it every time I see someone wearing a Libre [glucose monitoring] sensor.”

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The following alums also gained valuable experience through Hack@UCF before working for these major companies:

Carolyn “Carrie” Chenicek ’05 ’16MS
Principal Security Engineer at Starbucks

Jason Cooper ’15
Senior Security
Engineer at Amazon Web Services

Alex Cote ’21
Senior Cloud Security Engineer at Abbott

Kevin DiClemente ’15
Principal Architect at Microsoft

Peyton Duncan ’21
Tech Lead, Senior Software Engineer – Risk and Response at TikTok

Kai Garcia ’21
Senior Staff Security Engineer at Abbott

Milo Gilad ’24
Associate Analyst, Falcon Complete at Crowdstrike

Harrison Keating ’24
Senior Cybersecurity Engineer at Abbott

Colton Knight ’24
Penetration Tester at IBM

Odell Moreno ’19
Senior Manager, Cybersecurity at Abbott

Oliver Moreno ’23
Cybersecurity Specialist at Abbott

David Maria ’20
Senior Consultant at Crowdstrike

Cody McMahon ’15
Security Software Engineer at Microsoft

Lawton Pittenger ’23
Security Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services

Martin Roberts ’20 ’22MS
Staff Security Engineer at Fountain

Michael Roberts ’19 ’21MS
Senior Manager, Product Security at Abbott

Austin Sturm ’18 ’21MS
Security Engineer at Amazon

Nelson Torres ’20
Software Engineer at Abbott

Ditmar Wendt ’16
Senior Game Security Engineer at Amazon