CYBERPATRIOT

     The seven girls are all 10th grade students.  They include Bailey Ellis, Czarina Land, Lynae Herndon. Kaitlin Doddridge, Kimberly Drennan, Sahana Kargi and Sasha Singh.

     According to the CyberPatriot website, “CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program.  There are three main programs within CyberPatriot: the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, AFA CyberCamps and the Elementary School Cyber Education Initiative. CyberPatriot was conceived by the Air Force Association (AFA) to inspire students toward careers in c​ybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines critical to our nation’s future.” ​

     The Beehive team competed in the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition.  According to CyberPatriot’s website, “At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. The competition puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services.  Teams compete for the top placement within their state and region, and the top teams in the nation earn all-expenses paid trips to Baltimore, Md. for the National Finals Competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.​”

     Twenty-nine Utah teams competed among the total of 4,404 teams from across the United States.