How University of North Georgia Beat Georgia Tech at the NSA Codebreaker Challenge, Twice

When University of North Georgia set out to build a competitive cybersecurity team, they didn’t start by recruiting computer science majors. They started with CyberGEN.IQ, and the results beat every technical university they went up against.

The Challenge

Building a competitive cyber team usually means recruiting from a narrow pool: students already studying computer science or cybersecurity. That approach leaves a lot of talent on the table. Some of the best natural problem-solvers on any campus have never written a line of code, and traditional recruiting has no way to find them.

UNG wanted a team that could compete with, and beat, established cybersecurity and IT programs at other schools. They needed a way to identify students with the right cognitive aptitude, regardless of major.

The Approach

UNG used CyberGEN.IQ to assess students across the university, not just those already enrolled in technical programs. The assessment identified students with strong natural aptitude for cybersecurity thinking styles: creative problem-solving, pattern recognition, and working well with ambiguous or incomplete information, independent of whether they had ever studied the subject.

The team that resulted included majors in philosophy, criminal justice, education, and the humanities alongside more traditional technical students.

The Results

UNG’s teams won the NSA Codebreaker Challenge in both 2019 and 2020, decisively beating teams from established technology-focused universities.

In the 2020 Challenge, UNG’s team scored 323,150 points. Georgia Tech, the second-place finisher, scored 74,010, less than a quarter of UNG’s total.

89 UNG participants completed the first six tasks of the challenge, more than any other school fielding a team of similar size. 27 UNG participants completed all seven tasks; the next-closest competing school had four.

Beyond the competition results, the team saw real structural change:

• Team size grew 4x, made up largely of students with no prior cybersecurity knowledge going in.
• Women’s participation grew from 10% to 20% of the team.

What It Means for Your Institution

Traditional recruiting for cyber programs, filtering by major, prior coursework, or existing technical skills, systematically excludes students who would excel if given the chance. UNG’s results show what happens when that filter is replaced with one that measures aptitude directly: a bigger team, a more diverse team, and a team that outperformed dedicated technical programs at other schools.

“UNG’s diverse teams included majors in philosophy, law enforcement and the humanities,” said Doug Britton, Haystack Solutions CEO and Founder. “These teams handily won NSA’s 2019 and 2020 Codebreaker Challenges, against cybersecurity and IT majors from several of the country’s most elite technology-focused universities.”

CyberGEN.IQ gives educators a way to find that talent before a single class is scheduled, so training resources go to the students most likely to make the most of them.

Let’s Talk About Your Program

If your institution wants to build a cybersecurity team that draws from your entire student body, not just your CS majors, we’d like to talk. Let’s start a conversation.