Northern Kentucky University sophomore Sarah Ogden is just one of 12 women selected to compete on the first-ever U.S. Women’s Cyber Team.
U.S. Cyber Games Commissioner Jessica Gulick said that over the last three years, the U.S. Cyber Games Team has collaborated with individuals worldwide and found that the lack of women on teams was a shared challenge and opportunity.
“In collaboration with Japan, the UK and Europe, we collectively agreed that by putting together a women’s team program, we could help focus our energy around recruiting more women into cyber games and get enough energy around the globe to promote and outreach to women about the various teams that are available,” Gulick said.
Since a young age, Ogden said she has been interested in math, which led her to participate in coding/computer science camps. In high school, she attended the Delaware Area Career Center in Delaware, Ohio, for cybersecurity.
At the career center, Ogden said she was able to compete in various capture-the-flag challenges, which are cybersecurity competitions that test participants’ skills by asking them to find vulnerabilities in a system to capture a piece of information.
Ogden then chose to pursue her passion for cybersecurity at NKU. She chose NKU because its college of informatics has a robust cybersecurity program and offers the opportunity to double major. Ogden is double majoring in cybersecurity and data science and will graduate in 2027.
“She’s just written her ticket to her dream job,” NKU Professor Maureen Doyle
NKU professor in the school of computing and analytics Maureen Doyle taught Ogden in her first year at the university. Doyle said Ogden was impressive from the get-go.
Doyle said Ogden came to her office hours to introduce herself and asked about the university’s Women in Cybersecurity group. At the time, the group hadn’t had any leadership in a year or so. Ogden contacted the academic advisor and is now President of NKU’s Women in Cybersecurity.
“Her curiosity impresses me,” Doyle said. “She loves forensics. I think she’s a kind of a puzzle person. And if I say ‘this is available,’ she just goes for it. I think even her being on this team is because she just took the initiative. She’s just a curious person, and she tries things, and she takes advantage of the opportunities that are available to her.”
Ogden is also a threat operations intern at Kroger Technology & Digital. Though it isn’t unheard of, Doyle said Ogden landing an internship after only having one year of school under her belt is rare.
Earlier this year, Ogden attended the Women in Cybersecurity conference, also known as WiCys, and competed in cybersecurity capture-the-flag competitions. She spoke with coaches from colleges across the country and said one of them recommended she try out for the U.S. Women’s Cyber Team.
“I had never heard of the U.S. Cyber Games before, so I thought, ‘sure, why not?’” Ogden said. “I was really shocked when I got the invite to interview and even more shocked when I got on the team.”
The U.S. Cyber Games hosts a capture the flag event that is open to everyone in the country. Ogden said around 5,000 people competed in it this year. From there, candidates with the highest scores were selected to interview for the team.
Gulick said they had roughly 55 applicants and conducted around 35 interviews to select 12 players. Ogden said she would be on the team for a year and then have to reaudition.
There are different sections of the competition. Ogden said she scored well in forensics, which is the process of analyzing digital evidence to identify cybercrimes and the offender.
“Part of it is they’re looking for people that score well in each individual category, and not just overall because they want the team to have diverse talent,” Ogden said.
Doyle said Ogden is talented and that her combination of degrees alone shows how multifaceted she is. In addition to her having made the U.S. Women’s Cyber team, Doyle said Ogden’s degrees show her skills in math, statistics, data science, programming, cybersecurity, forensics and defense.
“She’s just written her ticket to her dream job,” Doyle said.
Ogden specializes in forensics and attack/defense on the U.S. Women’s Cyber Team. Gulick used a football analogy to describe the different specialties—not everyone on the team can be a wide receiver or a quarterback. The team has women specializing in reverse engineering, forensics, crypto and more.
Gulick said while education and certifications are great, by playing games and immersing themselves in the environment, players have told her that they learned more in a couple of weeks than in two years of schooling.
“They’re cultivating a network of people that can appreciate curiosity and trying things out and learning, and because of that, they’re able to accelerate that learning further,” she said. “It’s that applied value that you can’t necessarily get out of a book.”
The U.S. Women’s Cyber Team is not a “B team,” Gulick said.
“They are not women that could not make the program,” she said. “There’s no reason for the segregation of gender in cybersecurity. It’s simply we are doing this because we want to focus on attracting more women to cybersecurity teams and careers locally.”
Part of the interview process to make the team was asking each candidate if they were willing and a good fit to be a role model. Gulick said part of being on the women’s team is to attract more women to the career field.
“Much of cyber is about human behavior, so it’s important to have diversity on the team protecting your networks because those that are attacking your networks are just as diverse,” Gulick said.
There are many benefits to a job in cybersecurity Gulick said. The field typically offers high wages, a mission to protect networks and digital identities, flexible schedules, remote work, the ability to work as a team and more.
According to ISC2.org, a non-profit organization specializing in training and certifications for cybersecurity professionals, roughly 20—25% of the cybersecurity industry comprises women.
“When you have any field, be it nursing, which tends to only attract females, or you have computing, which attracts males, you’re missing out on a whole half of the population,” Doyle said.
Ogden said their goal on the team is to be role models to other women who are interested in STEM to show them that they can do this work, too.
The U.S. Women’s Cyber Team will travel to Tokyo, Japan, in November to participate in a special women’s cyber games exhibition, the Kunoichi Cyber Games, at the 2024 Code Blue Conference.
Games like the Kunoichi Cyber Games typically consist of capture the flag, which tests skills in triage, the ability to determine which challenges to pursue, forensics, web security, cryptography, reverse engineering and binary citation. Gulick said they also typically run a game that is called attack and defense, which essentially involves protecting your own server while attacking your competitor’s server.
The team will select five players for its first string, though Gulick said they are trying to take most of the team to Tokyo to serve as ambassadors. Ogden said she doesn’t know yet if she will be in the first string.
When she graduates, Ogden said she wants to pursue security engineering or a security analyst type role with a focus on big data, which is large, hard-to-manage volumes of data.
Doyle said Ogden is an example of going for something and having no fear. She said college is the time to explore and take risks.
“I’m just so proud of Sarah,” Doyle said. “I think being on a national team, we are all at NKU so happy for her just to have this experience. Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime experience that’s just from her taking the initiative.”
