Presidents Cup Cybersecurity Competition

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the Nation's risk advisor, working with partners to defend against today's threats and collaborating to build more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future. In this role, CISA builds the Nation's capacity to defend against cyber attacks: the Agency works to provide cybersecurity tools, incident response capabilities, and assessment services to safeguard the Federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) .gov' systems and systems that support national critical functions.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), per Executive Order 13870, is responsible for hosting the annual President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition (PCCC). Established in 2019, the PCCC is a national cyber competition that aims to identify, challenge, and reward the best cybersecurity talent in the federal workforce. The President's Cup consists of individual and team challenges focusing on areas across the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE Framework). Competitors face an array of challenges requiring an extensive skill set to complete.

The President's Cup competition is split into Teams and Individuals competitions with the Individuals competition broken out into two tracks: Individuals Track A focusing on defensive work roles and tasks from the NICE Framework, and Individuals Track B focusing on offensive works roles and tasks. The Teams competition focuses on both offensive and defensive work roles and tasks, with teams comprised of up to five individuals.

The President's Cup has two qualifying rounds that down select the participants to compete in the Finals, currently held in-person at CISA facilities. In both Individuals tracks, participants have four hours in each round. Teams have six hours in Teams rounds. In each round, participants are given multi-part challenges that vary in score based on difficulty. The difficulty level of challenges increases with each successive round of the competition. Based on the requirements of E.O. 13870, the challenges are designed for experienced, highly skilled cybersecurity practitioners. While all federal employees are encouraged to participate, only those with advanced skill sets are expected to compete each year (usually executed annually in FYQ2 or FYQ3).