Minisink Valley High School Juniors Joseph Cloidt and Travis Lysyczyn, who attend Orange-Ulster BOCES’ Career and Technical Education Center, are members of the team which placed second in the Gold Division of the New York State round of the CyberPatriot National Youth Cyber Defense Competition.

Earning second place honors in the state round now allows the team to advance to the National Semifinals round.

CyberPatriot is a youth cyber education program developed 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 critical to the future and security of the United States.

At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, which puts teams of high school and middle school students in the position of  being newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company.

Through a series of online competition rounds, teams are given a set of virtual operating systems and are tasked with finding and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services. Each round lasts six hours and involved 4,316 teams that entered this year in the open division from across the United States and Canada.

In addition to Joseph and Travis, team members are: Caleb Garver of Chester Academy; Dominick D’Amico of Warwick Valley High School and Nicholas Petraro of Monroe-Woodbury High School.  They are all first–year STEM Academy/Computer Networking students.