Western Washington University's cyber defense team claimed first place at the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition on March 21 and 22 in Olympia, winning the regional championship for the first time since 2014. The WWU squad beat out the University of Washington and defending champions Oregon State University, earning a spot at the national competition for the first time in over a decade.
The Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, or PRCCDC, is one of the most competitive collegiate cybersecurity events in the country. The Pacific Rim region alone includes 13 colleges and universities from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. This year's event was hosted at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia. Western Washington University in Bellingham has competed in the event for years, but the 2026 win marks only the second time in the school's history that the team has taken the top prize.
The competition format mirrors real-world cybersecurity scenarios. Each team is handed a set of cloud servers that have been intentionally misconfigured to create vulnerabilities. A group of professional hackers, called the Red Team, then spends the competition attempting to break into those servers while the student teams defend them in real time. Teams are scored on how well they keep their websites, email servers, and other services running, how effectively they protect sensitive data from the attackers, and how they perform on additional mini-challenges called "injects."
The injects ranged from technical tasks like diagramming the team's network and drafting a secure password policy to a more offbeat requirement: writing a poem about good security practices. Teams were also tested on how they managed simulated customer service interactions designed to distract competitors during high-pressure moments. Scenarios included helping a customer deal with a spider and fielding a claim about Russian hackers inside the building's walls. The intentional absurdity is part of the design, testing whether teams can maintain focus and protocol discipline when their attention is being pulled in multiple directions.
The Western team was made up of eight students: cybersecurity seniors Clay Molitor, Nick Mayer, Adin Jura, and Austin Reyes; cybersecurity juniors Dylan Hopkins, Tori Ulm, and Matt Harris; and computer science senior Grayson Koch. Their win reflects both individual skill and the depth of WWU's cybersecurity program, which has grown significantly in recent years as demand for trained professionals in the field has accelerated across every sector of the economy.
The national competition, where WWU will now represent the Pacific Rim region, draws top-ranked collegiate teams from across the United States. For a school the size of WWU, competing against programs from much larger research universities is a significant challenge, and making nationals after a 12-year absence is an achievement the program will carry momentum from regardless of the final result.
Cybersecurity as a field has deep relevance to Whatcom County's business community. Small and mid-sized businesses across the region have faced increasing threats from ransomware, phishing, and credential theft in recent years. The pool of local talent that WWU's program produces feeds directly into regional employers, local government agencies, and the broader Washington State technology sector.
More details on the team's competition performance and the path to nationals are available at news.wwu.edu. The university's cybersecurity program information, including course offerings and student organization details, is posted on the main WWU website. For other education news from Bellingham's schools, the 2026 Promise Award recipients from Bellingham Public Schools are recognized in a separate story.
