Elk Grove students head to national cybersecurity competition
ELK GROVE — Armed with a keyboard and mouse, some students in Elk Grove are ready to go head-to-head with professional hackers.
"We find vulnerabilities in the computer's systems to try to make them harder to hack," said Franklin High School junior Ethan Ho.
Ethan is among dozens of local students headed to the CyberPatriot National Championships, the Air Force Association's youth cybersecurity competition. Middle and high school students will face live virtual attacks from a team of cybersecurity professionals. They'll try to hack them, testing their ability to quickly secure operating systems while under pressure.
"This is real hands-on learning and on-the-job learning. These kids, if they don't know something, they Google search it and they know it before they finish the competition," said CyberPatriot Coach Sean McNally. "We have sponsors like Cisco who make these competitors take a Cisco networking practices quiz as well as provide them a virtual computer network that's broken and needs to be configured."
They've already had a series of competitions and out of more than 5,000 teams of students from around the country, only 28 teams of six students made it to nationals. Two of those teams are from Elk Grove, one from Toby Middle School and one from Franklin High.
"Now in the finals, we're going to have active, malicious characters attempting to break into our networks while we are hardening them," said CyberPatriot Coach Chris Shuping. "You have that added pressure of now we've got an attack going on active and live and it's a whole different level of training."
"By increasing the number of students interested in this industry, we can then have an increased number of people going into the workforce and trying to fill these positions. These are high wage earning jobs right out of college," said McNally.
The premier cyber defense competition is setting students like Ethan on a path to a successful future.
"I've already learned a lot from this competition. I've already had a lot of fun participating in this competition. So I really feel like it's been its own reward sometimes," Ethan said.
Ethan said they're up for various prizes including a scholarship. The students will be practicing for the next two weeks leading up to the national competition in Bethesda, Maryland in March.