On Feb. 15, Master Sgt. Dale Steen received notification that the Lincoln-Way East Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps CyberPatriot computer network defense team took first place in their division for the state of Illinois.

The team members include Carleigh Phelon, Grace Arnold, Dominic DiAngi, Colin Murphy and Rebekah Stryjewski. The participants competed from the business computer labs at Lincoln-Way East on Jan. 19.

CyberPatriot, the National Youth Cyber Education Program, was created by the Air Force Association to inspire K-12 students toward careers in cyber security or other science, technology, engineering and math disciplines critical to the nation’s future.

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 cyber security vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services.

The competition is open to high school and junior high school students from around the world. Lincoln-Way East’s team competes in the “all services” division, which includes approximately 1,700 JROTC and Civil Air Patrol units worldwide.

During two qualification rounds, the teams are divided into platinum, gold and silver tiers. Lincoln-Way East’s team competed in the gold tier along with 16 other teams from Illinois.

To learn more about CyberPatriot, visit www.uscyberpatriot.org. For more information about Lincoln-Way East AFJROTC, contact Steen at dsteen@lw210.org.