RBR Students Win the Air Force Association's Cyber Patriot III National Championship

Four teenagers from Shrewsbury among six students from two other towns attending Red Bank Regional High School --all part of a team from the school's Academy of Information Technology outperformed 11 other teams from throughout the nation to win first place in the nation's largest high school cyber defense competition.

The competition was held in Washington D.C. on April 2.

The CyberPatriot III National Championship is co-sponsored by government, non-profit and commercial sources under the non-profit Air Force Association (AFA). Promoting an understanding of cyber defense and its importance in our national defense is the AFA mission.

The team was nicknamed "Team Mantrap," after an industrial team in cyber security lingo. The team includes: Adam Cotenoff, Josh Eddy, Jack Kelleher and Colin Mahns of Shrewsbury, Jared Katzman of Little Silver and Chris Barry of Bradley Beach.

Team Mantrap was the only team from the entire Northeast region of the country to have qualified for the national finals. As finalists, the team already beat out 174 other teams from across the United States.

The team brought home the President's Trophy, which they proudly displayed. In addition to the trophy, each of the winning students received a $2000, college scholarship from Northrop Grumman, the main sponsor of the final competition. Five of the team members will graduate RBR in June, and all intend to pursue careers in cyber security.

"This (national championship) means scholarship monies, eligibility for Honors Scholar status at their universities, prospect for job internships," said Mandy Galante, RBR teacher and advisor.

According to an RBR press release, Galante said winning the national championship most of all means "networking with industry leaders."

 She noted that it means a future for her students, and where their talents in cyber security will be recognized and nurtured.

Recognition came soon after the announcement that Team Mantrap won the competition in which a celebration was held attended by corporate executives, defense contractors and government officials.

Each of executives, contractors and officials vied for the attention of the six team members.

Cyber industry expert Dr. Vincent Cerf was on hand. Cerf was one of the founders of the Internet. He was a guest speaker at the program's symposium and a quasi-deity to computer wonks around the world.

According to the press release, the team members are still ebullient from their victory, but not necessarily surprised that they won the national compeition.

Shewsbury's Costenoff said that he "knew from the way our guys were working and the points on the board that we were way ahead."

Team members started to pack up their notes ten minutes before end of the competition and nearly drove Mrs. Galante out of her mind.

"It's cool," team members told her when they saw panic in her face. The told her "we did fine."

The competition took place over a five-hour stretch in a large room where each team was ensconced in its own makeshift section. A scoreboard listed the team's progress as the challenge evolved, but the identity of the teams was kept anonymous, so no one knew which team was actually in the lead. Throughout the competition. most of the teams' scores tracked closely together, except  for the still anonymouse winning team, which maintaind a clear distance ahead of the others. Team Mantrap didn't know it, but it was actually way ahead.

Costenoff had discovered the CyberPariot III Competion early in the school yearand asked Mrs. Galante it it might be something they could look into. The elimiation process began sixmonts ago with 186 high schools registered from the United States. Applicants included public, private and high technology focused high schools. The three qualifying competionstook place at the teams's own high schools during all-day weekend sessionsThe schools' computers were tied into AFA server, which provided softwaree for the competition and ral time scoring as students successfully identified and eliminated cyber threats against their computers witn a specifi9ed time framt. The resulting twelve national finalists were invited to the ffinal even with expensed paid by the AFA sponsors.

As Team Capatin Jack Kelleher comments. "Originally Team Mantrap got involved because it sounded really cool and because we would always rather do hands-on  applications of the stuff we learn in textboos. As time went on we got better and better, we started to think "Hey we could win this thing! Just like a  sports team, we reviewed our last game to find areas for impr9vement. We documented game plans, and we did drills over and over agains.

The students had also been recently been interviewed by German Public Radio while they competed in another competiton, The German radio reporter was intereste in showcasing the school's prgram sicne the cyber security has become a national priority for allk industriialzed nations. 

In addition to her students' hard work and preparation, Mrs. Galante believes  Team Mantrap had beneficial advantages, RBR offers a very unique computer curriculum that is not available in many other schools. Students take specific courses which lead to the certification in computer networking and computer security. The latter is directly applicable  to the CyberPatriot II competition. They also had the guidance and mentorship of Herb Kelsey, as RBR parent who, at one point in his career, was head of cyber security for IBM. 

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