The Owensboro Innovation Academy’s CyberPatriot team recently finished second in the state open competition. CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, which pits teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company.
Through a series of online competition rounds, teams are given a set of virtual operating systems and are tasked with finding and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services.
The competition is split into two divisions. One is for ROTC programs and the other is for non-ROTC (or open). There were eight teams in the open division in the state of Kentucky.
The OIA team competed in 2 preliminary rounds in October and November, followed by the state round in December. Each round consists of three images of virtual machines running various operating systems such as Windows 10, Windows Server, and Ubuntu. Students are given a list of approved users for each machine and what sorts of programs should be allowed. In addition to the virtual machine, students are given a 10 question quiz and packet tracer activity using Cisco. The team must complete all images, packet tracer, and quiz in a total of 6 hours.
The team is coached by Logan Walker, a computer science facilitator at OIA.
“As the coach, the second-place finish was a great achievement from where we started 5 years ago,” Walker said. “I entered our first team in 2018 after attending training that summer for a new cyber security course we were offering. I heard about this competition while at the training and thought it sounded like fun. I put out an offer to my small class of about 15 students who were in that first pilot course. I had one boy and one girl volunteer and jumped headfirst into this competition.”
They finished last in the open division that year, but have slowly improved every year since then.
Team members this year include Owensboro High School sophomores Luke Wellman and Gunny Howard, as well as Hancock County High School senior Ruby Decker.
“Luke and Gunny have been a part of the team for two years while Ruby has been with us for four years. She really helped us step up our game the last few years,” Walker said. “Ruby has been taking some IT courses at OCTC and has used what she has learned in those courses to help us improve our scores each round.”
The OIA team was able to advance to the national semifinals. The top 24 teams from that round move onto the National Finals which are held in Baltimore, Maryland.
“The preliminary scores from that round were released and we will not be moving on to that competition, but we got a taste of the jump in difficulty for the semifinal round compared to previous rounds,” Walker said. “Hopefully, we can use what we learned from this experience to advance further next year.”
