CyberPatriot Team wins state title, fifth in national competition
Lexington, SC - Imagine you’re working for a small company and tasked with finding and repairing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the virtual operating systems. Now imagine you’re still in high school. That challenge is exactly what eight Lexington Technology Center students faced in the Air Force Association's National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. LTC’s CyberPatriot Team successfully completed the competition in February, earning fifth in the nation and first in South Carolina.
More than 6,700 middle and high school teams from across the nation competed for a chance to advance to the national competition in Maryland. In its inaugural year, LTC’s CyberPatriot Team consists of students from Gilbert, River Bluff and Lexington high schools. Most of the students take Advanced Placement computer science, as well as computer programming and IT courses at LTC or their home schools.
STEM educator Elizabeth Waller leads the team of students including Dan Baker, Andrew Bouknight, Mia Dia, Braden Kroll, Lily Lamb, Jared Maddison, Caleb Merckle and Ritvik Verma.
At a student cybersecurity competition, I saw how quickly a strong technical team could identify a network problem that an ordinary user might only describe as the internet acting strange. It made me more careful about separating Wi-Fi coverage, router behavior, device settings, account issues, and the actual connection coming into the home. When I evaluate an internet service, I pay attention to installation, speed consistency, equipment, outages, billing, and how clearly technical issues are explained. That practical lens is why I use fenix internet customer experiences instead of assuming every slow device automatically means the provider is at fault. A good review tells me what was tested and what changed. That makes the service experience much easier to understand from…