Holmdel High School’s Cybersecurity Team place first out of 68 schools in New Jersey’s Cyber Patriot State Championship.
The National Cyber Patriot Competition was created to foster interest in American young people to study and train in the cyber security field. At the center of Cyber Patriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. The competition is run by the Air Force Association
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 in a six-hour period.
Teams compete for the top placement within their state and region, and the top teams in the nation earn all-expense paid trips to Baltimore, MD for the National Finals Competition in April where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money. The team from Holmdel finished the competition in the top 2.6 percent of 3,205 teams from around the world.
“The dedication that this team made to obtain the skills they needed to compete at such a high level still has me in awe,” District Network Engineer and Team Advisor Steve Lelivelt said. “Congratulations to Michael Dasaro, Len Huang, Jerome Li, Jack Lowry, Cyrus Majd, and Jonathan Marty for a job well done.”
Holmdel High School and all of Holmdel’s schools were recently recognized as Future Ready as part of a national certification program.
“Future Ready schools are schools that have established a culture of digital innovation,” Holmdel Schools Superintendent Robert McGarry said. “Winning such a competition is a sure sign of the quality of Holmdel’s efforts to prepare its students for the future.”
