U.S. Air Force Association CyberPatriot
CyberPatriot is a competition that is supported by Northrup Grumman, a large U.S. defense contractor, the U.S. Air Force Association and other supporters who have a vested concern in helping young people understand the ramifications of working in a cybersecurity position.
You do not have to be a student to participate in CyberPatriot. Here are some of the pertinent details:
- The competition starts usually around September with a practice round designed to help yo understand how the competition runs, complete with answers to the problems.
- You will work in teams of 3-5 students.
- You will likely have a mentor. In times past our mentors have come from the Red Rocks Community College cybersecurity program.
- You will start by working with Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux. At first you will work with just the workstation-level software (i.e. your PC's operating system), but then you will graduate to the server versions of each.
- You will use a well-known virtualization product called VMWare in which you'll run your competition operating system problem images.
- You will be looking at/for services (e.g. daemons in Linux), file and user permissions, rogue executables, registry hacks and other things like this.
- While you are working on the operating system environments, another person on your team will be going through Cisco Academy's Packet Tracer program, trying to solve a networking problem.
- Of course, as you move through the year, you will be downloading increasingly difficult images to solve. Some of them can be pretty daunting!
- If you are interested in training ahead of time, you can get free training right from the CyberPatriot website.
- There several different divisions. You will compete in the open division. There are divisions for middle school, and ROTC students as well.
- For each division, there will be a silver, gold, and platinum winner. Silver and gold divisions cannot proceed past the state-level competitions. Platinum winners have the ability to go on to national finals. National finalists go to Washington D.C. for the final competition of the year.
- Depending on how well you score, you may wind up going through several different competition rounds, culminating in late winter of the following year (e.g. 2018 - 2019).
- CyberPatriot uses a scoring engine to score the competitors as they go through their image looking for issues.
- The competition is open for three days. Typically we run our competition segment at Warren Tech on the first day (usually Friday) from 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM. You will likely be in your regular classroom for all competitions, though there is a possibility that at least some of the competitions will be held at Red Rocks instead.
- One of the biggest advantages of competing in CyberPatriot is that you get to meet the students in the Red Rocks Community College cybersecurity program, including their instructors. Red Rock's cybersecurity program is one of just a handful of colleges in the nation that have been awarded a Center of Excellence status by the National Security Agency (NSA). If you are interested in a cybersecurity position, Red Rocks would be the ideal place to start.
- In the 2017-2018 school year, the Warren Tech PM team took 2nd (gold) in the State open division semifinals. The AM team got a high platinum score, but did not advance past semifinals.