Imagine a computer-savvy team gathered in front of their monitors clicking through a computer’s registry for anything out of place, searching for malicious executable files and unauthorized users on the network. The team members spend hours searching, quarantining and destroying to quickly eliminate threats.
It may sound like a scene out of a basement where network administrators and computer techs gather to keep a business afloat. Instead, it’s at Tabb High School — the only York County school participating — and the team comprises students preparing for their first year in a national competition.
Each year, the contest called CyberPatriot pits teams of two to five competitors against one another. Participating teams log on to a virtual machine that can be equipped with two different virtual operating systems — Windows or Linux. The machine is primed with a predetermined set of problems like, for example, a malicious executable file.
CyberPatriot provides a piece of software that is loaded onto the network to track what steps the students take to solve the problem and how many of the problems they solve. The CyberPatriot software then scores the teams on the tasks they perform.
The contest was created by the Air Force Association and, according to its website, is “the premier national high school cyber defense competition.” The first round will be held Nov. 15 through Nov. 17 and teams who survive round one will move on to the second in early December.
From there it’s semifinals, state rounds, regionals and finally a national competition in Washington, D.C. Wooten said he did not know how far the Tabb team would get this year, but he hoped for the best.
“We’re going as hard as we can this first year,” Wooten said.
The Tabb team consists of five students, five alternates, a mentor and a coach. The computers are being loaned to the team from the York County Schools networking team.
While he said that students aren’t learning malicious coding or commands, the short answer is: They learn a lot about things that can potentially harm a computer. In fact, a large portion of the CyberPatriot curriculum is devoted to cyber ethics, which teaches the kids to use their powers for good.
Team members learn about proprietary rights, defense, government and public systems and the protection of intellectual properties. They also learn about cyber law.
“Breaking into someone’s computer is against the law,” Wooten said.
Tabb’s CyberPatriot team is being funded through the a $3,000 grant from the Tidewater Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A recent news release said the grant is intended to “inspire high school students toward careers in cyber security or other science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
Also funded through the grant at Tabb is a weather balloon project in Joyce Kuberek’s chemistry classes. The project involves buying a weather balloon for students to learn how to launch, retrieve and collect data from it.
