Troubleshooters: OIA cybersecurity team wins top prize in CyberPatriot competition | News | #hacking | #cybersecurity | #infosec | #comptia | #pentest | #hacking | #aihp

“It felt great,” Wellman said. “To get first was very liberating.”

CyberPatriot, the world’s largest National Youth Cyber Education Program, was created to help direct students toward careers in cybersecurity or other STEM disciplines, according to CyberPatriot’s website.

“Essentially what it was is that it was a nationwide competition where you compete roughly four or five times in a season, which spans a year,” Wellman said.

For the competition, Wellman said he and Howard were both responsible for finding vulnerabilities, or issues, in the Linux and Windows operating systems respectively as part of the “Network Security Challenge.”

“Every computer would have several problems … that you needed to fix,” Wellman said. “Every vulnerability that was fixed, you would get a certain amount of points.”

According to Wellman, the competition was done remotely as he and Howard arrived at the school and would have a six-hour time frame in one of the computer labs “searching and searching.”

While Howard said there are practice images that can be downloaded from the Internet to help prepare for the competition, most of the action occurs the day of.

“… It’s sort of just all in the moment,” he said. “You just have to go through the computer and see if there’s anything you can find.”

Howard said the pairing of him and Wellman came about during their freshman year.

“It’s something that we’re both interested in. (Luke) actually works at an IT company and then I’ve been interested in computers,” he said, “so our computer science teacher just asked us after school one day if we would be interested in it, and we decided we would try it.”

Since then, Howard and Wellman have achieved some recognition as the school’s cybersecurity team beyond CyberPatriot.

In June 2022, they placed 15th out of 65 teams at the national Technology Student Association (TSA) competition in Dallas, Texas.

According to the TSA’s website, the organization is focused on developing skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) along with business education.

In the TSA competition, participants were to respond to a cybersecurity challenge by identifying a breach in computer security through “Capture the Flag” games and complete the challenge in a limited amount of time.

Even though they are on the same team, Howard said the competitions give him and Wellman a chance to test out their skills against one another.

“It’s sort of like a competition between ourselves as well,” he said. “Trying to do better than the other person and seeing what they can figure out, and then obviously we can also help each other to see if we’ve missed anything that the other person can get.”

Howard and Wellman both hope to continue a career path in cybersecurity upon graduation.

“I think cybersecurity is an extremely fast growing industry, and even the entry level (positions) pay very well and I’ve always been passionate about computers,” Wellman said. “Doing something that you love for a decent amount of money would be perfect.”

While the pair plan to compete again for CyberPatriot, their main purpose is to grow from the experiences.

“We’re really not doing this just to be first in the state …,” Wellman said. “We just want to get better at cybersecurity. That’s why we did this in the first place.”