In an effort to help facilitate the development of a regular, national level cyber security exercise, the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) hosted the first Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition for the Southwestern region in May 2005.
On June 29, 2010, United States House legislature passed recognizing the National CCDC for promoting cyber security curriculum.
While other exercises examine the abilities of a group of students to design, configure, and protect a network over the course of an entire semester, this competition is more focused on the operational task of assuming administrative and protective duties for an existing commercial network.
Teams are assessed based on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs.
[3] The NCCDC is operated under the rules as published by the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at UTSA.