South Newton’s Information Technology students recently competed in the state round of the CyberPatriot cybersecurity competition coached by their teacher, Mrs. Rhoads. CyberPatriot’s National Youth Cyber Defense Competition is the world’s largest cybersecurity competition. It is sponsored by the Air & Space Forces Association and challenges teams of high school and middle school students to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities in virtual operating systems. Using a proprietary competition system, teams are scored on how secure they make the system. The teams have six hours during each online round to secure 3 to 4 compromised systems such as Windows 10, Server 19, Ubuntu and Fedora. Teams also complete a Cisco network configuration simulation and a Cisco exam. Securing these systems provided by the competition allow the students to experience real world scenarios in a virtual environment.
In the first two rounds over 3,200 teams across the nation were divided into three tiers based upon the teams’ scored skill level. South Newton had two all senior teams (+1 junior) rank Platinum. One all sophomore team rank Gold and the two freshman teams (+1 junior) rank silver. Platinum (top 30%)=expert, Gold (middle 40%)=advanced and Silver (bottom 30%) =beginner. The State round was the third round of the season where the South Newton teams competed against other Indiana teams within their ranked tiers. Teams wait anxiously for the Cisco portion to be scored and the official results to be released, which can sometimes take up to 10 days. The majority of our teams’ image only scores were enough to qualify for semi-finals after the round. However, once the Cisco portion points are added, teams can move drastically up or down in placements.
Gloss