On Friday, November 14, 2014, the John Bapst Cyber Defense Teams spent six hours competing in the CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. The competition puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services in a six hour period.
Since the teams have outgrown the computer lab, they spread through the school library where they worked industriously in small groups spread through the library working on part two of a combined two-round qualification, the first portion of which was conducted earlier in the fall.
Of the five teams John Bapst had competing, the varsity team came in 62nd in the nation out of 801 teams, and 23rd out of the 301 teams east of the Mississippi river. The varsity team members are Owen Leaden ’15, Noah Phillips ’15, John Parrick ’16, Isaac Webb ’16, and Brett Knowles ’17. These results will certainly mean the varsity team is in contention for a spot at the nationals in DC this spring.
Our other four teams all fell into the middle of the pack on both accounts(339th -> 513th and 138th -> 214th). Overall it was a very good showing from John Bapst, the only representatives from the State of Maine.
The CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Education Program was created by the Air Force Association to inspire high school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.