The Department of Energy hosted its fifth CyberForce Competition on Nov. 16, during which 105 college teams worked to defend simulated energy infrastructure from cyberattacks. The event was held at 10 of the department’s national laboratories across the United States.

The University of Florida, DePaul University and Clemson University rounded out the top five scoring teams.

“The CyberForce Competition is designed to inspire the next generation of energy sector cybersecurity professionals by giving them a chance to hone their skills during realistic scenarios,” according to a news release from DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

During the competition, teams defended simulated infrastructure from attacks by red teams, or adversaries, composed of industry professionals, while maintaining services for customers, played by volunteers.

The company said the facility was built in response to a growing sense of urgency for cybersecurity threat preparedness. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, 3.5 million cybersecurity positions will be unfilled by 2021, and that skills gap continues to grow.

“To help address these issues in an ever-changing marketplace, the Tech Data Cyber Range will immerse users in a ‘safe’ environment,” Tech Data’s release said.

The cyber range will serve as a place for Tech Data’s vendor partners to test and demonstrate technologies to their customers to build on cybersecurity solutions and mitigate cyberthreats, the company said.

Tech Data is partnered with the National Cyber Warfare Foundation, which built its own cyberwarfare range in 2012.

The Advanced Test High Energy Asset, or ATHENA, operated in a netted environment with a government command-and-control system and radar sensor.

Lockheed said airmen operated ATHENA during the demos, where the laser weapon system acquired and tracked drones, using its high-energy laser to destroy the targets.

The company developed ATHENA to provide a cost-effective anti-drone capability that complements the systems already used by the military.

“We’ve watched in recent news this type of laser weapon solution is essential for deterring unmanned vehicle type threats, so it’s an exciting time for us to watch airmen compete Lockheed Martin’s critical technology,” said Sarah Reeves, vice president of missile defense programs at Lockheed.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. LMI said in a Nov. 1 release it acquired “substantially all assets” of the Texas company.

Clockwork Solutions offers a predictive analytics software platform. Predictive maintenance has been an attractive concept for the Department of Defense as it looks to reduce billions of dollars in maintenance and readiness.

The idea requires identifying system failure before it happens and then repair parts before they break. Analysts at Global Market Insights guess the predictive maintenance and machine inspection segment in AI in the manufacturing market is projected to grow by 44 percent annually between today and 2025.

“This the perfect next chapter for our employees and our customers,” said Will King, CEO of Clockwork Solutions. “In joining the LMI team, our employees will benefit from expanded professional growth opportunities, and our clients will have access to an array of expertise, tools, and technologies to help them meet their predictive analytics business requirements.”

The MMSP technology can be mounted on planes, helicopters and certain drones. It comes with a wide-area motion imagery system, a wide-area hyperspectral imager, a high-resolution spotter, and an onboard embedded processor for real-time processing and storage.

WAMI systems are used to detect and track targets. The spotter can be cued to monitor 10-plus locations and identify the targets. The hyperspectral imager searches for unique signatures of camouflage netting, explosive stores, tank hulls and other relevant targets.

“The MMSP covers an area in real-time as well as records, tags and stores up to eight hours of imagery for review by analysts while the pod is still in the air. It does all of this while fitting in a package that weighs less than 100 pounds,” Doug Rombough, the vice president of business development for Logos Technologies, said in a news release.

The technology can decrease “the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sorties needed over a target area,” according to the executive.

With a wide-area motion imagery, or WAMI, system, the MMSP can cover an area 15 times larger than that of traditional hyperspectral sensors, the release said.

The company will also display a number of lightweight WAMI systems, including the Redkite pod, the Redkite-l for the Insitu Integrator, the Kestrel Block ll for aerostats and the Multi-Modal Edge Processor.