Sandia National Labs NM Partnerships Collaboration Report 2021-2022

The first-place team of four, (facing camera) Sasha Thomas and Waleed Nasr, and (backs to camera) Ethan Emmons and Christie Gorka, compete in Sandia National Labs’ TracerFIRE competition at Purdue on March 26-27.

Another TracerFIRE event in August 2021 allowed engineering and computer science undergraduate students from New Mexico State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, UNM, and Eastern New Mexico University to investigate advanced persistent threat style adversaries throughout the simulations. The event gave insight into how to recognize adversarial tactics within the kill chain such as reconnaissance, attack vector, exploitation and exfiltration. In October 2021, more than 50 participants engaged in a TracerFIRE event at Purdue to teach students to investigate multiple advanced persistent threat adversaries in a simulated incident response scenario. Other participating schools included Norfolk, Pacific Northwest, and Illinois. Two teams from Illinois traveled to Purdue for the event, with Illinois Director for Research Don Takahara joining as an observer seeking to bring TracerFIRE to his campus in the future. The annual TracerFIRE challenge at Purdue in March 2022 focused on cyber forensics and security. In partnership with the Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), Sandia led the Spring 2022 Symposium, which used TracerFIRE 11 to teach thirty-nine students in a challenge exercise on a voter fraud scenario. Derek Hart

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2021-2022 Collaboration Report