The Department of Computer Science at UCSB organized a very unique event. A "capture the flag" hacking contest that involved students from a number of Universities and Institutions. This exercise was organized as part of a graduate class on Network Security and Intrusion Detection taught by Professor Giovanni Vigna at UCSB.
The exercise was held on December 5th and involved UCSB, GeorgiaTech, the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, North Carolina State University, the United States Military Academy, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Previous editions of the class included "local" hacking contests as a form of evaluation of the techniques learned in class.
This year it was decided to extend the exercise to a number of Universities and Institutions interested in security education. This was a very first example of this type of exercise on such a large scale.
The contest was carried out December the 5th, from 9am to 5:30pm, PST. The competing teams were given a web site prepared by the organizers. The web site contained a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities. The task of the teams was to find the vulnerabilities, fix them for their copy of the site and exploit the same vulnerabilities to compromise the security of other teams' sites.
The teams gained points by keeping their web site active and uncompromised and by compromising other teams' sites (that is, "capturing their flag").
You can find more information at http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF.