Follow the digital trail: Cyber Fire Puzzles challenges students to think like cyber investigators
Published: Aug 28, 2026 7:45 AM
By Joe McAdory
Auburn computer science students, from left, Nate Buck, Gabriel Basaraba and Gabriel Capron were among 67 students from three universities to participate at Cyber Fire Puzzles, held Aug. 21-23 at the Brown-Kopel Center..
How do cybersecurity analysts uncover what happened on a compromised computer system? How do they trace the digital clues left behind by an attacker? And how do students learn those skills before entering the workforce?
The Department of Energy (DOE)’s Cyber Fire Puzzles competition.
Hosted by the Auburn University Ethical Hacking Club (AUEHC) with support from the Auburn University Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Engineering and run by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Cyber Fire Puzzles brought 67 students from Auburn, the University of Alabama and University of South Alabama to the Brown-Kopel Center on Aug. 21-23 to tackle a series of digital forensics and cybersecurity challenges in a team-based environment.
“Events like this help because I’m actually seeing what I could be doing in the future,” said Nate Buck, a senior in computer science and AUEHC public relations officer. “Cyber Fire Puzzles gives me an idea of the tools I could be using and the way I need to think as I'm working through these problems. When you get into a situation where it’s, ‘We've been hacked. What’s the next step? Where do we start?’ events like this help prepare you for that.”
Through a series of puzzles including cryptography and network analysis, students practiced analyzing data, identifying suspicious activity and solving real-world cybersecurity problems.
Gabriel Capron, a senior in computer science and AUEHC webmaster, said cybersecurity investigators often have dozens of tools at their disposal. But which tool is used for what?
“It really helps with my ability to discern what a good tool is versus a bad tool,” Capron said. “Another big thing that it does is it helps your intuition as a cybersecurity professional. A lot of the top-level threats are stuff that’s harder to pin down. Really, this is building the skill to think, ‘Something doesn't feel right about this. I'm going to investigate this more.’”
Daniel Tauritz, the COLSA Corporation Cyber Security and Information Assurance Endowed Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE), who also serves as Auburn University’s director of national laboratory relationships said the goal was to give students a “mental workout” representative of real-world cybersecurity work.
“These puzzles are designed by cybersecurity professionals within the DOE’s Cyber Fire program to reflect the challenges they face in protecting critical infrastructure, detecting threats and responding to attacks,” he said.
Tauritz said the biggest difference is that this year, LANL decided to not make it a straight competition, but added a teaching component.
“Students had a five-hour digital forensics workshop on Saturday (Aug. 22) that taught the basics,” he said. “Veterans of this competition, or students who’d taken CSSE’s digital forensics course, already knew most of the stuff, but this provided an extra educational component for the first-timers so they could fruitfully participate.”
There’s also a recruiting component, to a degree.
“A lot of this is about pipeline development for incidents response and digital forensics,” said Aaron Scott Pope, Tauritz’s first doctoral graduate at Auburn (2020) and cybersecurity researcher in LANL’s Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group, which helped facilitate the event. “Twenty years ago, many operational systems were isolated from the internet or kept on air-gapped networks. Today, organizations are connecting systems that never would have been online in the past, often to enable remote access and management. As more critical systems become connected, cybersecurity is more important than ever.”
Cyber Fire Puzzles kicks off the AUEHC’s cyber competition season and serves as a warm-up for what lies ahead. Last fall, the club finished eighth out of 100 teams at the DOE’s national CyberForce competition, while additional Auburn teams finished 24th and 25th, respectively.
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