Cyber patriots

LYNN – Students in the Lynn English Junior ROTC program have shelves filled with drill team trophies, but now they are stalking a CyberPatriot championship as well.”We could win this this year because these kids are willing to do the work,” said team mentor and coach Kevin Geaney. “That’s the difference between these kids and other teams. They are willing to do the work.”CyberPatriot is a national high school cyber defense competition created by the Air Force Association. Junior Nick Madden said two years ago they opened the program up to Marine Corps ROTC programs, which is when LEHS got involved.”It’s a program that looks at cyber security,” Geaney said.Geaney, the school’s Cisco Academy advisor, signed on to coach the cadets. He said initially he taught them the Cisco program, which is aimed at giving students a working knowledge of computer networking. Then he began to chase down any material he thought would help the cadets get a handle on cyber security and over the summer he attended what he said was essentially a security boot camp at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.”I did it to help these guys,” he said with a laugh. “It was a bunch of smart young people and me, the old guy.”Along with lessons from Geaney, Madden said they tackle what amount to cyber security breach scenarios set up by the national Cyber Patriots program.Madden said they will be told the name of the company and who the key players are in the module, or scenario, but it’s up to them to run system checks and figure out what the security breaches are, if any.”There is always something a little bit harder to find that they don’t tell you about,” said senior Marcos Pontes.”And sometimes there will be a back-door virus,” added sophomore Maxwell Dimick.The students train in detecting cyber security breaches with Geaney about three days per week. In October they will put what they’ve learned to the test in the first of what could be several competitions. Pontes said there is a practice competition in October, regionals are in November, semifinals are in January and if they have the stealthy cyber chops the national competition is at the Pentagon in late winter/early spring.The group entered its first competition last year and placed third at the state level. When asked what a competition is like, Madden quipped, “It’s six hours in front of a computer.”Each team is given a cyber security problem to solve and they have six hours to get it done. Madden joked that it includes a lot of togetherness and a lot of pizza.He got involved in the program after Sgt. Major Ken Oswald, who runs the JROTC program, told him it was akin to playing video games.”He always explains it that way,” said Dimick.Dimick said he learned about the program from Brendan Sang, who graduated last year.”He asked if I liked computers,” he said.Robert Rodriguez-Rios said he was just looking for something to do after school and the idea of stalking cyber prey peaked his interest.”I didn’t really want ROTC,” admitted sophomore Matthew Nevers. “I wanted to do Cisco Academy but Sgt. Major told me about CyberPatriot.”Sotheary Ath is the only female on the team, which she said is “definitely different,” but it does not seem to be a problem for either side.”It’s always a challenge, but they’re very funny,” she said.The way they joke with each other, stepping on lines and occasionally finishing each other’s sentences, shows that Ath and her peers are very much a team.”They are a complete blast,” said Geaney. “They are fun and funny and vicious when it comes to protecting their company.”Pontes said he is feeling a lot better about the upcoming competition than he did last year. He said they are also trying to get a second ROTC team and a school team in place to increase the likelihood that the program will continue into the foreseeable future.Geaney is focused on this year’s event, however.”We’re doing better than third place this year,” he said with confidence. “These kids can do this. I