Exploring The CyberPatriot Competition
The CyberPatriot Competition challenges teams from across the nation, and our very own Michael Fuller is taking part.
The Midphase blog talks a lot about cybersecurity and protection because it is important, not just to our clients, but to everyone sharing and storing sensitive data online. A member of our staff, Michael Fuller, has joined the search for the next big breakthrough in U.S. cybersecurity by mentoring a group of high school students in the area in the CyberPatriot competition. The competition encourages young people to search for and correct vulnerabilities in a simulated environment, teaching them about the threat that cybersecurity poses to our nation and hopefully increasing the stringent online security we rely on every day.
Fuller explains: “Cybersecurity is a largely misunderstood, understaffed, and misrepresented field”. This is why the US Air Force Association designed this competition for the next generation of online citizens looking to learn more about STEM activities. STEM is an area of education that represents science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Additionally, the experience of cultivating next generation cybersecurity technicians will give mentors like Fuller a chance to teach and learn as a team in a STEM environment.
Watch the video below to learn more about the CyberPatriot competition:
The team which Fuller mentored – Team Vanguard – is comprised of Jared Manning, Curtis Morgan, Hayden Nielsen, Jackson Milne, and is coached by Gordon Anderson and Bonnie Campbell, instructors at Bridgerland Applied Technology College. The team meets weekly “to study and practice securing and hardening Linux and Windows servers, as well as a Cisco ASA firewall” according to Fuller. The team finished first in the state and tenth in the nation, and has been invited to compete at a regional level. If they perform well at regional level the team will be invited to a national championship in Washington D.C.
“Truthfully, the team hardly needed me as they are so bright! The work I did revolved primarily around providing insight and understanding of how Linux works as compared to Windows, as well as how to perform a lot of routine security and hardening tasks on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual image.” Fuller continues, “I was pleased to see the team come together, learn, and slave away over their keyboards to achieve 10th overall in the nation for our division!”
You can find more about the CyberPatriot competition here.
The competition sees 491 teams originating from the US and Canada go head to head. “It’s thrilling to see so many youth take an interest in it, and I can only hope that as programs like CyberPatriot continue to gain traction, we will see an increase in the number of cybersecurity professionals.”
For more information about keeping your data safe from cyber criminals visit Midphase.com