Cape Central Junior ROTC cyber defense team takes top honor in state competition

Cape Girardeau Central High School’s cyber defense team, part of the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFJROTC) formed in September, took home a state title in cyber defense in its first year competing, with coaching from Southeast Missouri State University cybersecurity students.

The cyber defense competition is part of CyberPatriot, the National Youth Cyber Education Program created by the Air Force Association for elementary and high-school students.

Central’s team went up against nearly 5,000 other teams in three divisions from across the United States and Canada, said Col. Mike Goodin, instructor with Central’s AFJROTC program.

“We won Missouri against 14 other teams in the state,” Goodin said.

The team missed qualifying for nationals by 22 points, he said.

Connor McGarr, a Southeast Missouri State University senior studying cybersecurity, works with Cape Girardeau Central Air Force Junior ROTC cadets Nick Stearns, right, and Dalson Caudle on Wednesday during a meeting of the Junior ROTC cybersecurity team Wednesday at Cape Girardeau Central High School.Jacob Wiegand

But, he said, “We have our sights set on rising.”

Goodin said the relationship with Southeast’s cybersecurity team was a result of “stars aligning.” Last fall, he reached out to Vijay Anand, associate professor of computer science at Southeast and faculty adviser to Southeast’s Cyber Defense Team.

Anand said the team is seven-year reigning champions of the Missouri Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.

“They’re good at what they do,” Anand said of the team’s students.

“We picked students who had knowledge and could teach newer kids the details needing to be done in the competition,” Anand said, adding the Southeast students on the cyber defense team often have to train new members in the basics.

In the competition, students are given a fictional system, and tasked with finding vulnerabilities. Those need to be fixed while keeping the system’s critical services up and running, according to uscyberpatriot.org.

“We didn’t know how far the students would go,” Anand said. “They did great.”

Anand noted Southeast’s cyber defense team also won at the collegiate competition the first year the team competed.

Anand selected Southeast senior Connor McGarr of Cape Girardeau and Southeast freshman Jack Gavin of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, both cybersecurity majors, for their technical skills, competition knowledge, and real-world experiences, he said.

Both are members of Southeast’ Cyber Defense Club and Cyber Defense Team.

The two provided mentorship and technical support, explaining concepts and helping the students train for the competition, held in January, on location at each participating school.

McGarr said coaching Central’s AFJROTC cyber team was an opportunity to help the next generation hone their skills and prepare for possible careers in defending against growing cyber threats.

“When I was 14, I wouldn’t have known what to do,” McGarr said. He said he focused on the fundamentals with the AFJROTC students, and once things started clicking for them, that knowledge base was helpful.

The team is limited to six members — the majority of whom are freshmen, so they’ll be together as a team for a few years, Goodin said.

Team captain Nick Hodges said he joined the team because he has a lifelong interest in computers, and had heard about the CyberPatriot competition and wanted in.

McGarr said the competition isn’t just about solving a set number of problems. It’s about making a hypothesis, assigning roles to team members and working together to research and solve any issues.

Five computers were set up at once for the competition, McGarr said: two Windows machines, two Macs, and one running Cisco, a networking operating system.

Team members specialize in different areas, McGarr said.

Goodin noted students must practice good digital citizenship or risk being penalized. Students caught cheating risk penalties in the competition, he said.

“It’s been a tough journey, but it’s amazing to think about how some other school was the champion last year, and this new team toppled them this year,” McGarr said. “I couldn’t be prouder of them.”

Despite never imagining himself as a mentor, McGarr said he learned and grew a lot as a student and professional from this experience.

“Coaching developed soft skills that I’ll definitely need and use when I graduate,” he said. “A lot of what a cybersecurity job entails is relaying technical information to administrators or executives who may not know or understand the lingo and procedures.”

Now, the AFJROTC team is looking ahead to next year by working with their Southeast student coaches to write a team playbook, in hopes it will lead to continued success, Goodin said.

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

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