Codebreakers Place 4th in NSA ChallengeUniversity of Texas at Dallas students placed fourth in the nation in the 2022 National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenge, which asked college students to solve a fictional ransomware attack. A team of 141 UTD students earned the highest ranking of any Texas team in the semester-long competition, which included more than 5,000 students from 600 U.S. academic institutions. Computer science senior David Wank, one of the team’s leaders and an officer of UTD’s student-led Computer Security Group, was one of three Comets who completed all nine tasks. The other students were Neel Pareshbhai Patel and Andrei Racila, computer science graduate students. Computer science senior Evan Bailey, computer science junior Suraj Mathashery and mathematics senior Weston Miller all placed in the top 500 individually in last December’s competition, which included more than 3,400 participants.