Chinese contestants from major companies had been dominating the contest in recent years, but new regulations from Beijing prohibited them from joining this year's fray.

"This is not a technical document ... This is about a very human process," says one of the authors from the prestigious Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon.

Stempfley will take over Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute’s CERT Division, the oldest Computer Emergency Response Team in the world, SEI announced this week.

Underlining the NSA's race to hire the best and brightest is a list of universities that offer myriad of computer security training programs, each providing a stepping stone into the secretive agency. In this context, Carnegie Mellon University is to the NSA what the University of Alabama is to the NFL.