Marshall Academy Continues to The National High School Cyber Defense Competition

Article contributed by Senior Kevin Houk

Congratulations to Team 1 and Team 2 of Marshall's Cyber Security Club - they made it to the national finals for CyberPatriot—The National High School Cyber Defense Competition!

The results are in! Marshall Academy has 2 of the 12 teams across the nation that are heading on to the Open Division finals of CyberPatriot V - held at the
Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland on March 14,
15, & 16. Congratulations to them, their sponsors and mentors on an
outstanding job! It should be mentioned that Team 1 scored highest in the
nation on the semi-final competition.

CyberPatriot is the premiere national high school cyber defense competition established by the Air Force Association. CyberPatriot’s founding partners are SAIC and CIAS at the University of Texas-San Antonio. The Northrop Grumman Foundation is the Presenting Sponsor for CyberPatriot V (this year's competition).

CyberPatriot was created to inspire high school students toward careers in
cyber security or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future. Last year Marshall
Academy’s Cyber team scored 7th in the nation out of 500 plus teams in the
CyberPatriot IV Open Division. The Marshall Cyber Club is sponsored by Jason
Simeon of the Marshall Academy and mentored by Ryan Walters of TerraWi in
Tysons Corner.

On January 12, 2013, our teams competed (from TerraWi offices) in the
CyberPatriot V Open Division semi-finals, aka Round Three, against 45 other
teams (semi-finalists from over 600 teams in the competition this year). The
competition lasted for six straight hours, and required each of our three teams
to ‘harden’ multiple computer/server images.

a. A computer/server image is a file that CyberPatriot makes, and for all intents
and purposes, is a computer that can be run within a computer.

b. The images the teams received for round 3 were Windows 2008 Server, Ubuntu 10.04, as well as an added forensics challenge.

The teams must find and remove viruses, malware, back doors, and security
flaws, as well as decrypting and decoding encoded messages.


GCM students who are going to the finals are:

Team 1: Jack Lynch, CJ Gardner, Peter Morrissey, Alex Handley, Ramon
Martinez-Diaz, and Captain Kevin Houk

Team 2: Pear Ansorrypour, Alex Ryan, Peter Marr, Jessie Galanxhi,
Charlie Franks, and Captain Jacob Walters