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CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program created by the Air & Space Forces Association to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation's future. ?At the core of the program is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, the nation's largest cyber defense competition that puts high school and middle school students in charge of securing virtual networks. 

CyberPatriots consists of a training/practice "season" and a competition "season," just like football. During the off-training/practice season, CyberPatriot training and practice computer images are not available.

Both the training and the competitions challenge students to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities in virtual operating systems of Windows 10, Server 2019, and Ubuntu 22 (a Linux-based OS). Using a proprietary competition system, teams are scored on how secure they make the system.

Teams advance through the Introductory and State Round, with the top 50% advancing to the national semi-finals. All three of these rounds are held online at the school, but the school can see how well they are doing state-wide and nationally through a scoreboard. The best of the best advance to the in-person National Finals Competition.

The competition lasts a maximum of six hours, and has two challenges:

• Network Security Challenge (approximately 93% of score): involves finding and fixing security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Server 2019, and Ubunto operating systems.
• Cisco Networking Challenge (approximately 7% of score): consists of an online quiz and a virtual networking exercise based on specific training materials.

Competitions are held in the media center on Fridays during most of the day. See the schedule for competition dates.

Because the Network Security Challenge is such large part of the overall score, we focus practices on the network security challenges.

However, I will make the Cisco Networking training course available online to all students for anyone who wants to take the self-paced course.