This year, I have decided to work on finding additional opportunities for the class to help build their resumes and explore specific concepts within the field of IT. Given that many students have expressed interest in the opportunities related to cyber security, I thought it might be interesting to start a Cyber Patriot team, although I did not know much about it as I jumped in.
What is Cyber Patriot?
https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/Pages/About/What-is-CyberPatriot.aspx
CyberPatriot – The National Youth Cyber Education Program is STEM program of the Air & Space Forces Association. It was created to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future.
THE NATIONAL YOUTH CYBER DEFENSE COMPETITION
At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, which puts teams of middle and high 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 top teams in the nation earn all-expenses-paid trips to Maryland for the National Finals Competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.
How are we doing it?
Thanks to working with Gannon (Carly Hammer and Reagan Von Richter) to secure grant money to create a team, we have set things up as follows (note: we are all just learning/figuring it out as we go).
The cyber patriot team is made up of up to 6 students (this year it is 3 seniors and 3 juniors). I may continue this trend of half juniors half seniors so that in later years knowledge can be passed down without having to start all over, or I may even try to include some sophomores to build additional years of experience.
I am, admittedly, not a cyber security expert, but once enrolled into the cyber patriot program, you can be provided with a mentor who can actually handle the majority of training the students for the competition. Ultimately, it is the coaches role to just make sure the students are given the opportunity to compete, and it is the mentor’s role to prepare them.
About once a week, typically Friday, our mentor, Brian Thiessen (Gannon helped connect us, he is a former cyber patriot nationals competitor and professional cyber security expert), comes in and 8 students are sent with him and an aide for almost the entire class period to review materials to prepare for competitions. Note: the additional 2 students are there for shadowing so that they may be considered for team next year. If this is a success, we may even have 2 teams next year.
What was the setup like?
I had to create a cyber patriot account, and then create a team. For team name, I just used ECTS, but if there are multiple teams, the name should be more unique. I then had to provide an administrator’s contact info for verification (I used the director’s). Once verified, I had to obtain permission from each team member’s parents that they could compete and then I had to add them to the team through my cyber patriot dashboard (https://volunteer.uscyberpatriot.org/CPPages/CPDashboard.aspx ).The students then had to verify their email and submit a form. Additionally, because this was sponsored by Gannon, the students also had to complete a form for them (link provided to me by Gannon).
I was also provided a ridiculous amount of material that simply overwhelmed me because I did not know what I should even be working on. Eventually I was given a link from Cyber Patriot with instructions to create a new email account that had the team number it in (eg. cp164516@gmail.com), and then use that to set up an account in CISCO Networking Academy (CISCO | Networking Academy). Apparently, given the specific naming convention of the email, that will lead to cyber patriot providing access to specific courses related to what I and the students can use to prepare.
For all of this set up, I leaned heavily on the new partnership with Brian Thiessen (our mentor), just to keep calm and work through the process.
What does a competition look like?
At the time of writing this, we are still learning, but basically you are given a set of 4 virtual machine images (our first few were Windows 10, Server 2019, Ubuntu, and Debian). In the competition, it is the students’ job to “harden” these systems (make them more resilient against threat actors). This is done through things like updating the OS, removing unnecessary software, correcting user permissions, identifying processes that should not be running, etc.
The students should create a checklist before the competition of things to do to help harden each device.
For each task completed, there is a “scoring bot” that identifies the update and may award points. Each box is worth up to 100 points. Some things you do, even if they should be done, may not guarantee points. Also, if you do something you really should not do, you could lose points.
Competitions are done remotely (wherever you want) within a given set of days (eg. between Thursday and Monday), but the team has only a 4 hour window to complete the tasks. For us, our current plan is to hold the competition sessions on Fridays at noon and Brian and I will stay until 4 or so with the students to complete the job.
Currently, given our setup in a temporary classroom and everything up in the air due to renovations, acquiring adequate hardware to use outside of our classroom has been a bit tough (we currently have old laptops with sketchy wifi). I’m hoping as we move forward to find a better solution, but for just getting started and figuring things out, this will have to work.
Competition Schedule:
https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/Pages/Competition/Competition-Timeline.aspx
Note: we are in the High School Division (We are currently at an entry level of difficulty – “Silver”)
ALL COMPETITION PERIODS FOR CYBERPATRIOT XVI WILL BE FOUR HOURS LONG.
(DATES ARE TENTATIVE – MAY BE SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Teams may compete during the following times on competition weekends. All times are US Eastern Time.
- Thursday, 9:00 AM – Thursday, 10:00 PM ET
- Friday, 9:00 AM – Friday, 11:59 PM ET
- Saturday, 8:00 AM – Saturday, 11:59 PM ET
- Sunday, 8:00 AM – Sunday, 6:00 PM ET
- Monday, 9:00 AM – Monday, 10:00 PM ET
Note: All 4 hours must occur in one sitting.
Moving forward, I hope to update this page (or create another page) with more information about our Cyber Patriot program, but for now I thought it might be nice to just make note of where we are with things.
After the first two rounds, the scores are combined to put the teams into tiers of difficulty (Silver, Gold, Platinum) leading into states:
Update: Here’s a reflection after our first competition (Oct 20, 2023): Our First Cyber Patriot Competition
Update: Here’s a reflection after our second competition (Nov 3rd, 2023) : Our Second Cyber Patriot Competition.
