On Friday, October 20th, thanks to a sponsorship with Gannon University, a small group from ECTS Computer Programming was able to compete in our first ever Air Force Association Cyber Patriot competition.
Joining the competition was a bit of a last minute decision with us just barely beating the deadline to sign up and secure funds. We were going in with nearly no preparation or even knowledge of what we were getting into, but it seemed like diving in head first was the best way to learn. Thanks to some information provided by representatives from Gannon, and thanks to them putting us in touch with an excellent Cyber Patriot mentor (Brian Thiessen), we felt supported enough to throw our hat in the ring.
The student team was made up of Srikar Rallapalli, Keegan Vilushis, Isaac Trost, Arpan Uprety, Mason Melaragno, and Weston Kilgas. Leading up to the competition, we had one practice with Brian and that was about it. Given the state of renovations of the school and limited available resources, we scrounged together a few older, yet sufficient, laptops and created a make shift setup in the back room of the Skills Center at ECTS.
Our competition was made up of 2 virtual machine images (1 Windows machine and 1 Ubuntu) which needed “hardened” so that the many vulnerabilities of the machines were resolved. This included things like user management, OS updates and a variety of rules/permissions that might need changed. Our setup had 1 laptop that was dedicated to working on the Windows machine, and 1 that was dedicated to the Ubuntu, and then the teammates took turns working on cleaning up the systems while the others used additional laptops to research issues and identify how-tos to complete tasks the active “drivers” were trying to accomplish. We also had pizza, soda, and chips to help keep the event fun and loose.
To be quite honest, while the team is made up of extremely smart and capable individuals, since we didn’t really know what we were getting into and since we had limited time to prepare, my goals were modest. The maximum score you could get in the competition was 200, and I was thinking anything over 90 would be a big success since this first experience was really about learning what it’s all about…the team blew that away! The students worked on cleaning up the virtual machines from about 12:30 until 4 (stayed after school) and scored a whopping 150 points! They fell just one task short on the Windows machine (19/20), scoring 95, and scored an additional 55 points on the Ubuntu. I believe they would have scored significantly higher on the Ubuntu, but there was one issue they could not resolve that was preventing them from working on the other unfinished tasks (Srikar was losing his mind!). Still, considering that we do not spend any dedicated class time on Linux (yet), a score of 55 is really impressive! We also lost a little time when the team accidentally locked themselves out of the Windows machine after changing the password and then rebooting to install updates (mental note: write down the users/passwords when you change them for these competitions), but instead of getting locked out indefinitely, the team cooked up a brilliant idea to work through another admin account and restore access. It was really quite clever. At the time of completion we were about in the middle of the pack nationally for scoring.
All in all, I think this was a great experience and I hope we are able to build it out and continue the Cyber Patriot work in years to come. I think the students really enjoyed it, and I could not be more proud of them!
