ACROSS THE COUNTRY, CANADIAN STUDENTS COMPETED IN THE CYBERPATRIOT, A GLOBAL YOUTH CYBERSECURITY COMPETITION. OUT OF OVER 133 CANADIAN TEAMS, THE TOP 11 WERE SELECTED TO COMPETE HEAD-TO-HEAD IN THE CYBERTITAN NATIONAL FINALS. NOW IN ITS 4TH YEAR, CYBERTITAN HAS GROWN INTO ONE OF THE LARGEST NATIONAL YOUTH CYBER DEFENCE COMPETITIONS. SO WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE A CYBERTITAN? THROUGH THE “MEET THE CYBERTITANS” BLOG SERIES, HEAR FROM THE TEAMS THAT WILL BE COMPETING ON MAY 17TH IN THE SECOND VIRTUAL CYBERTITAN COMPETITION.

Team Premature Optimization, William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute, North York, ON

Larry

Highlights about your team or team members?

I’ve done Cyberpatriot/Cybertitan for three years now and we were always missing people with the gift of being able to do the Cisco challenge. This year, I decided to look for these people specifically and would like to thank Feng and Om for soldiering through the Cisco course.

Returning Team? Let us know how you liked the CyberTitan competition.

By far my favorite competition was two years ago, it was my first time going to the national competition and being in Ottawa was awesome. I’m a bit disappointed that we won’t be going to Ottawa this year, but I still very much enjoyed meeting new people and learning new things from that year of the competition.

What encouraged you to join CyberTitan?

I’ve always been very interested in Cybersecurity, starting in middle school with web security. Two years ago, I was invited to the team by Lev, the former team leader. I thought that it would be interesting to learn more about operating-system security. At the time, I didn’t know much about Windows or Linux and have since learned a lot. The more I learn, the more questions I ask, which in turn helps me better understand the world of technology.

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cybersecurity?

I’ve always been an advocate of good cybersecurity practices and always will be. I think Cybertitan has taught me a lot about how to administrate systems and the challenges that systems administrators face. It has certainly helped me understand new classes of vulnerabilities and has helped to widen my perspective on cybersecurity in general.

Theodore

Highlights about your team or team members?

Who needs highlights when we’re all having fun!

What encouraged you to join CyberTitan?

Larry, God of Windows, convinced me to participate in CiberTitan since he needed a Linux person.

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cybersecurity?

It has taught me to do firewall rules/ssh config properly on my DigitalOcean droplet.

Feng

Highlights about your team or team members?

One of the highlights of my team is their enthusiasm in the competition. We also had a wide variety of skill sets, which allowed us to learn from each other and provided a positive team environment.

What encouraged you to join CyberTitan?

I joined CyberTitans because I thought it would be an interesting experience. I was always curious about cybersecurity, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn more about it.

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cybersecurity?

CyberTitan has made me realize the importance of setting up a secure network properly. Misconfiguring a single router could cause problems throughout the whole system.

Om

Highlights about your team or team members?

It’s been a really fun experience competing with my team, especially working with Feng on Cisco. We learned quite a bit together and many memories were made.

What encouraged you to join CyberTitan?

I’m interested in computers, so this was a great way to explore the security side of things while competing as part of a team.

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cybersecurity?

Although I knew beforehand about how important cybersecurity is to our daily lives, it’s been cool learning some of the technical details behind it, such as networking.

Andy

Highlights about your team or team members?

It’s nice that all of our team members are pretty close friends from the same school; so there is good teamwork

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cbersecurity?

I’ve always had aninterest in cybersecurity, and this competition seemed like the perfect way to test my skills and expand my knowledge in practical cybersecurity.

How has CyberTitan changed your perspective on the importance of cybersecurity?

It taught me a lot about real-life cybersecurity; my previous experience was mostly in the form of CTFs [capture the flag (CTF) contests], which are notoriously unrealistic at times. This contest showed me the importance of less known things like secure policies and configurations; stuff that I can use in the real world.