Cyber security lays foundation

Justin Bean, Mark Reuter, Charles Boyd, Chris Bero (captain), Jose Forero, and Matthew Copeland Not in picture: Chris Elegante

Students at Bob Jones High School are intrigued about the world of cyber security, a career that some hope to have as a full-time career.

CyberPatriot is the premier national high school defense competition designed to give students hand-on exposure to the foundations of cyber security.

Teacher Jeremy Raper, who is also coaching one of the teams at Bob Jones, said the cyber defense competition was created to inspire high school students toward careers in cyber security and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M) disciplines critical to the nation’s future.

Raper was recently named a 2011 Milken Educator and he is the Air Force Association’s Tennessee Valley Chapter and State Teacher of the Year. The other team at Bob Jones is made up of students from the JROTC team led under Lt. Col Herd.

Raper said has team solved seven out of 10 problems during round one of the competition.

“Members are even more excited to compete in round two, now that they have a better understanding of the process,” Raper said.

CyberPatriot is a competition in which teams find machines that contain several vulnerabilities, and students must clean the images of them. During the competition students are provided one to three virtual machines in each of the three competition rounds.

“The virtual machines can have Windows or GNU/Linux Operating systems and students are given a set amount of time on the competition day to clean the machines,” said Raper.

The team that finds the most vulnerabilities moves to the next round, and the winner of all three rounds get a chance to compete in the National Championships in Washington, D.C.

CyberPatriot is sponsored by the Air Force Association with industry and educational partners.

There are eleven schools in the Huntsville area competing, however, Raper is excited for his team and hopes they can advance to the final round.

The first round was recently completed and round two is scheduled to end Dec. 17. The combined scored of the two rounds will be totaled to determine who advances to round three in January. Finals are scheduled for March 22-23, 2012. Visit the CyberPatriot web site for more information Uscyberpatriot