Three local STEM teams participate in state CyberPatriot competition

  • Published
  • By Raquel March
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, TENN. --  Round-2 for the CyberPatriot VII competition began with rapid scoring on Nov. 14 as three local High School CyberPatriot teams battled for tier placement amongst 1,200 teams.

The CyberPatriot teams, two from Coffee County Central High School in Manchester and a team from the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) Composite Squadron in Tullahoma, competed with the assistance of the Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program.

The result of the Round-2 competition led to the local teams competing in noteworthy tier placements in the State Round on Dec. 5-6.

Each team strategized during the competition to reach platinum, gold and silver tiers. The teams from Coffee County qualified and placed - one as a platinum team and the other as a gold team. The platinum team's placement nationally ranks the team in the top 30 percent of 1,200 CyberPatriot teams. They will have the opportunity to participate in the regional and national competition. The gold team also competed in a special category round.

The CAP team placed as a silver team and they competed in a special category round as well.

AEDC CyberPatriot mentor Michael Glennon remarked on the progress of the teams.

"The teams are doing great and enjoying the competition rounds," he said. "The skills they are learning are being utilized to make various operating systems more secure."

The competition places teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired information technology (IT) professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services.

Regarding the Round-2 competition in the December issue of the Air Force Association CyberPatriot newsletter, The CyberSentinel, it is printed that, "Only three images and a networking quiz stood in the way of more than 1,200 teams meeting their goals. Most teams pushed through the medium difficulty Ubuntu and Vista images, but the most difficult test came with the Windows 8 image. It was the hardest image so far in the competition and was designed to break out the many high scoring teams into their tiers. The Cisco Networking Quiz challenged the team's time management skills as well as networking skills."

Top teams in the nation earn all-expenses paid trips to Washington, D.C. in March for the national finals competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.

CyberPatriot was created to inspire high school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other STEM disciplines critical to our nation's future.

CyberPatriot was established by the Air Force Association. The Northrop Grumman Foundation is the presenting sponsor for CyberPatriot VII.