Bellevue West student Tyler Grafft is in the middle of a high school competition, and he’s just scored for his team…by finding two unauthorized users that weren’t supposed to be on a computer.

In this competition, there are no cheering fans, screaming parents, pep bands or PA announcers. Instead, a half dozen students from Bellevue West’s Air Force Junior ROTC Varsity CyberPatriot team spent six hours in a computer lab, parked in front of keyboards, towers and monitors. They moved around to help each other, or to help themselves to a table full of pop, chips and pizza that fueled a long day of work.

The scene was replicated this same December weekend at Omaha South High Magnet School and a handful of other Nebraska high schools, all in the Omaha metro area. This was the state level portion of the national CyberPatriot competition.

Freshman Thania Williams and junior Juan Barrera-Mendoza are on South’s team.

“We’re trying to prevent hackers from hacking us,” explained Thania Williams, a freshman at Omaha South.

“The idea is to secure kind of like a fake network,” South junior Juan Barrera-Mendoza added. “It’s put on a virtual machine so we can do almost whatever we want without wrecking the real computer, but we’re scored on the good things we do and we get points taken away on the negative things we do.”

The students have to understand different operating systems, and find a wide range of things that could expose that system to a cyberattack.

Source: NET Nebraska

Read the full article: http://netnebraska.org/article/news/954653/high-school-students-learn-fight-cybercrime