Congratulations to Junior Jewel Diaz and her Orange-Ulster BOCES’  STEM Academy Cisco/CCNA Computer Networking Class Team D members on their recent in fifth place finish  in the New York State Gold Tear of the New York State round of the annual CyberPatriot Competition.

CyberPatriot’s National Youth Cyber Defense Competition challenges teams of high school and middle school students to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities in virtual operating systems. Using a proprietary competition system, teams are scored on how secure they make the system. Top teams advance through the online round of competition, and the best of the best advance to the in-person National Finals Competition.

While this team, and the three others who completed, will not advance to the semifinals, they did an excellent job competing against over 2,000 teams nationwide and in Canada. In the competition they were tasked with securing Windows and Ubuntu images as well as configuring various networks.

Other members of Jewel’s team were Tanya Esquivel Amudio of Middletown High School, and Connor Mahoney, Damian Mann and Jonathan Bedward of Pine Bush High School.

The competition is a cyber-education program conceived by the Air Force Association to inspire high school and middle school students toward careers in cybersecurity or other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)  disciplines.

Orange-Ulster BOCES CTEC programs give students the opportunity to graduate from high school with technical experience, professional skills, national industry certifications, and college credit in a wide variety of high-demand occupations.