The CyberPatriots competed in the state round on Saturday Jan. 12. CyberPatriots are students who train and compete to help strengthen cybersecurity in the U.S. and protect the citizens from hackers, or cyber terrorism.
“We were pretty much finding vulnerabilities inside the virtual machines,” junior Emiliano Zendengo said. “It’s like a computer inside of a computer put inside the machine.”
Handling computers is already difficult, but as the competition continues for the CyberPatriots, so do the difficulties of their challenges.
“They get more complicated and it starts stressing us out,” Zendengo said. “If we pass here we go to the semi-finals.”
To compete, the CyberPatriots split up into three different groups, one of them containing students from the computer science class.
“It’s really different, it’s helpful having a computer background going into this,” junior Mckenna Campsey said. “Computer science is more like programming and this is more security stuff.”
For some CyberPatriots the semi-finals aren’t their only goal.
“This is our first year and we want to get going at it, it’s a new experience,” Campsey said. “We’ve done really well so far this year with all of us being new to it.”