In only its third year of competing, Scott Plaster’s non-JROTC Cyberpatriot team at Atkins HS clinched the NC state championship, finishing as the top team in the top tier by more than 25 points at the state round held the week of January 15, 2018. Cyberpatriot is sponsored by the US Air Force as a way to foster cybersecurity skills among the next generation, and involves highly specialized skills that most high school students do not get a chance to encounter. At this level of the competition, the Atkins team finished in the top two percent of the more than 5,000 teams in the entire country.
“I am so excited we won,” said sophomore team member Caleb Rollins. “We said in the beginning we wanted to get the state championship and we delivered. Commitment to the team and coach was the key to our success.”
“I think the key to our win was persistence. Having a strong motivation to compete and do well really helped with that,” said Linux specialist Carson McManus, a senior who has been on the team all three years. Cyberpatriot competition requires building a knowledge and skills base on Windows, Windows Server, Ubunto, and Cisco networking, with a very steep learning curve.
“Winning the state this year was our goal, and we’re all elated. The guys on my team are the best; I’m extremely proud of them,” said Plaster.
When seniors Daniel Winkelman, Matthew Shealy, and Carson McManus graduate, the underclassman will resume the knowledge base and recruit new members to fill the team. Caleb Rollins will serve as team captain, and Ethan Flowers will take over as Linux expert.
“I think our victory was well-deserved. We have worked hard our three years as a team to overcome the steep learning curve,” said senior and team captain Daniel Winkelman. “I am very proud of our team's accomplishment; we have gone from being a group of three sophomores with no experience in this competition to State Champions over two years. This speaks volumes about our capacity as a team.”
Some say that white-hat hacking skills are the very most important skill of the 21st century, and this competition run by the US Air Force Administration is geared toward just that, helping equip the next generation with these skills necessary to protect against and thwart attacks on computer systems.
During the competition, each team has a six-hour window to run three (or even four) computer images as "virtual machines," and the students find and fix vulnerabilities such as missing passwords, hidden files, Windows updates, malware, and even registry entries. On the Linux-based Ubuntu system, most of the work is done from the command line, and even on the Windows images, automated scripts are programmed and run to save time. An online quiz is often included in the round, with a Cisco Packet Tracer exercise.
According to Winkelman, the team’s unique recipe for success is “a mixture of tenacity, organization, and passion for computing. We have never settled for a ‘good enough’ score, and find ways to improve after every round. As a result, we have an extensive checklist mixing results from our own rounds with research on other teams' successes.” Coach Plaster agrees. “Just OK, or good, doesn’t win state championships. We have been fortunate to build a team that gets along well and really enjoys working together toward this common mission,” he said.
The individual team member’s unique skill set also plays a role in doing well in Cyberpatriot, according to Winkelman. “All of us are extremely tech-savvy and do related stuff out of school. Carson has professional certifications in web development and he is the closest thing I have seen to a real-life hacker (from what I can tell). I have an ongoing internship writing C++ and C# code for a company, and I write as much code as I can in my free time. Caleb has strong interest in web development and has his own web domain. Ethan taught himself Python in middle school and is constantly expanding his repertoire. And Matthew is one of the most competent people I know when it comes to computer hardware, and he is the key to the Fuels Club's success,” said the captain. “Our common denominator is that we bring knowledge from our hobbies and future professions to this team, and we are always trying to learn new things.”
“I am very proud of our team! I feel the victory is deserved, as the team has worked very hard for several years to reach its current level of performance,” said senior team member Matthew Shealy. “I feel like developing a concrete and detailed plan of action prior to each round allowed us to function with maximum efficiency for the entire time window,” he said.
The team progresses to the National Regional level of the competition on Friday, February 9 against the top teams in the nation. Unfortunately, only the top 12 teams in the country get the all-expenses paid trip to the National competition. As always, the team will compete fiercely and vie for the highest spot possible in the national rankings, according to Coach Plaster. “Going to nationals is probably out of reach this year,” he said. “But who knows what may happen next year or in the future.”
The Atkins JROTC also competes, and its team qualified for the Gold tier this year. Coached by Sgt. Anthony Berry and led by junior Devin Freeman, the team even achieved a first-place state award two years ago in the lower Silver tier.
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