In its inaugural season, Chapel Hill High School’s CyberPatriot team qualified for the National Semifinals February 1-3 and ultimately placed 144th in the nation in a competition that focuses on solving cybersecurity flaws in operating systems.
Career and Technical Education teacher Jennifer Walker serves as the team’s advisor.
“I’ve always encouraged students to take part in the competition, and this year I had two students who wanted to be on a CyberPatriot team, so when they told me at the end of last year that they wanted to do that, we decided to get a team together and we went for it,” Walker said. “[CyberPatriot] provides a lot of opportunities for the students in many ways, [such as] scholarships, in addition to all the skills that they build when they’re actually in the competition.”
The team consisted of juniors Luke Roeber, Joseph Wilson, Andrew Paul and Raul Flores, as well as seniors Austin Kiziah and Dhruv Patel.
A CyberPatriot competition consists of a six-hour round during which teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and must find cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and then strengthen the system while maintaining critical services.
The competition also includes networking challenges in the form of quizzes and Cisco Packet Tracer activities.
Competitions ran throughout the year: team exhibition rounds were in the summer, and a practice round was held in October before the teams were finalized in November.
Two seeding rounds in November and December placed teams into the tiers of Platinum, Gold and Silver; teams only competed within their tier. Although the team formed after the practice round had passed, Chapel Hill qualified at the Platinum level and ranked first in North Carolina for the networking portion of the competition.
Preparation for competition required gaining an in-depth knowledge of networking and cybersecurity concepts.
“We usually had one or two study sessions [per week] after school,” Patel said. “Other preparation included programming and writing scripts, [which are] executable programs that run and perform various actions.”
The team split into smaller groups to specialize in specific skills.
“I am the Linux guy, so I deal with hardening the Linux systems,” Patel said.
Patel said he decided to join CyberPatriots because of his interest in cybersecurity.
“Cybersecurity is really important nowadays, as proven by recent security breaches. We will need people in the field to protect literally everybody’s data, as it is all being stored digitally, whether in your social media account, your bank account or your health information from the hospital,” Patel said.
Paul focuses on the Windows security aspect of the competition.
“My favorite part [of the competition] is solving the new and interesting problems we are given,” Paul said. “[When qualifying for semifinals,] we had to use decryption, which is something I had never done before, but it was fun to try to figure it out.”
Wilson served as team leader.
“Luke Roeber and I decided to form the team because we both think cybersecurity is a fascinating field that’s becoming more and more relevant over time,” Wilson said.
