Cyberpatriot team claims third place at state

Priest River Lamanna High School Cyberpatriot team members claimed third place at the recent state competition. A total of nine teams took part in the event.

Members of the team, in its first year of competition. are team captain and senior Beverly Ramirez, who selected the team as her senior project, eighth grader Noah Adkins, and eighth grader Elijah Davis. Team coach and head of the West Bonner County School District’s IT department is Ron Kruse.

Ramirez is a senior at PRLHS and both Adkins and Davis are homeschooled students.

CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program. 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 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-expenses paid trips to Baltimore, Maryland, for the National Finals Competition where they can earn national recognition and scholarship money.?