Student Teams From Red Bank Regional, Earle Headed To National Cyber Security Competition

Everyone is familiar with the portrayal of teenagers as computer hackers.

Going all the way back to Matthew Broderick breaking into a national defense computer to play a game of ”Global Thermonuclear War” in the 1983 movie ”WarGames,” to the current MTV show “Eye Candy” starring Victoria Justice as a hacker teaming up with police to find her missing sister, teens are inevitably on the wrong side of computer security.

There’s a group of Red Bank Regional High School students who are turning that perception around. The team is one of 12 nationwide headed to Maryland next month to show off their ability to stop computer hackers and cyber intrusions of all kinds.

They are participants in the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot, the association’s National Youth Cyber Education Program National Competition. The competition is the highlight of the program, created ”to inspire high school students toward careers in c​ybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future,” according to the CyberPatriot website.

The Red Bank team, Team Maroon, which claimed the fifth spot in the Open Division, will be joined in Maryland by Team Alpha from Naval Weapons Station Earle, which was tops in the All Service Division (Cadets), as well as two teams from Markham Place School in Little Silver who took the first- and third-place slots in the middle school competition.

The competition tests the team’s abilities to find weaknesses in computer system’s security while also challenging them to fend off a variety of cyber attacks, according to Jeremy Milonas, a teacher at Red Bank Regional and one of the team’s coaches.

Last year, in the Red Bank team’s inaugural entry into the competition, the students finished first in New Jersey and second overall in the Eastern Region. This year, the team captured the New Jersey and Eastern Regional titles, helping them win the national finalist berth, one of 12 teams to advance out of 978 nationwide.

“This team was hungry and motivated. They wanted to know exactly what it took to be finalist material,” Milonas and co-coach Mandy Galante said. As coaches we were running to provide more advanced trainings -- they took everything we could throw at them and wanted more!”

At the national competition, March 11-15, the teams will act as newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. They will not only have to fix all the security vulnerabilities on Windows and Linux computers, but they also will have to defend against real-time attacks like denial of service, Trojans, backdoors, password theft, man in the middle attacks and web exploits, maintaining critical services while they shut down the attacks.

After that challenge, the teams will then face a networking exercise from Cisco as well as a digital forensics crime scene.

The trips to the nationals are all-expenses paid, and the students can earn national recognition and scholarship money, according to the CyberPatriot website.

For more information about CyberPatriot, go to www.uscyberpatriot.org.