CyberCamp group photo on competition day. (Photo submitted by Jeffrey Richardson)
WESTFIELD– Eighteen Information Technology sophomores and juniors spent last week honing their skills in cybersecurity during CyberCamp at Westfield Technical Academy. Sponsored by the Air Force Association’s (AFA) CyberPatriot National Youth Education Program, CyberCamp is designed to teach students cyber safety, cyber ethics and critical network security skills and tools.
Information Technology lead instructor Jeffrey Richardson said last year was the first year his shop started dabbling in cybersecurity, which he called one of the fastest growing careers in the technology field. He said a report from Cisco in 2016 published in Forbes put the global figure at one million cybersecurity job-openings, and more than 209,000 unfilled in the United States.
As an AFA CyberCamp host, WTA received software and a hands-on curriculum. The camp culminated in a team-based competition that put the campers in the role of IT administrators tasked with finding and addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in simulated network environments.
IT lead teacher Jeffrey Richardson and assistant Alex Stuzhuk help students with the competition on Friday. (Photo by Amy Porter)
Richardson said during the competition, the students are given an image which intentionally has a bunch of flaws and back doors. They then try to secure it, and are scored for their efforts by a scoring engine.
He said the camp was similar to the AFA’s annual CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, in which students from WTA participated for the first time last year. The competition had two qualifying rounds, and scores were added together to form three tiers. WTA ended up competing in the top 30% tier. He said in Massachusetts they were competing against students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Academy of Math and Science, and the MIT Lincoln Lab, a Department of Defense sponsored program. WTA finished in the top 17% nationally.
Richardson’s three assistants in CyberCamp, all 2017 graduates, were among those who participated in the national competition last year. John Hale and Mark Mkrtchian, who were helping the sophomores at the camp, have both enrolled in Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) in the fall.
Assistants John Hale and Mark Mkrtchian (Class of ’17) help new sophomores Tim Yurovskiyh and David Tikhonchuk find and fix cyber threats. (Photo by Amy Porter)
“The competition was a challenge, especially in our area and the big schools we competed against. We did okay,” Mkrtchian said. He said he plans to focus on IT security at STCC, and eventually to transfer to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to continue his studies.
“It’s always evolving; there’s always something new each day,” said Mkrtchian about cybersecurity. He explained that someone can find a bug that is 20 years old, and still have to secure the system right away. Apparently, this happened in the UNIX system a few years ago, when one that had been in the system since it went online became active and gained administrative privileges. He said they released a patch to fix it.
“It’s a repeating process. There’s always old stuff needing to be patched and new stuff coming out every day,” Mkrtchian said.
“It’s all about cyber defense. We don’t teach any attack skills, we just learn about them so we can defend against them,” Richardson said.
Alex Stuzhuk, the assistant who was helping the rising juniors, has also enrolled at STCC to study computers and IT security in the fall, and will be attending with Mkrtchian and Hale. “There’s more job opportunities, more demand,” Stuzhuk said of the field.
CyberCamp juniors Mark Krikunov, Samantha Zabok and Cooper Miller see the potential in cybersecurity.(Photo by Amy Porter)
Mark Krikunov, Samantha Zabik and Cooper Miller, the students he was helping during competition day on Friday, are also considering cybersecurity as a possible career. “It’s a good opportunity, and good money,” Zabik said. In fact, according to information that Richardson has found, the median pay for cybersecurity jobs is $88,890 per year, with the top figure at $140,460.
“We have enough people who can program,” Stuzhuk added.
“This is also kind of fun,” said Hale.
The CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Education Program was created by the Air Force Association in 2009 to attract students to cybersecurity and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In addition to the national competition and the new CyberCamp program, CyberPatriot has launched an Elementary School Cyber Education Initiative designed to introduce young students to online safety. To learn more about CyberPatriot, visit https://www.uscyberpatriot.org/.
