CyberPatriot Open Division: National Champion & MVP

CyberPatriot is the nation’s largest youth cyber-defense competition, created by the Air & Space Forces Association. In the Open Division national final, I specialized as the domain controller security lead: hardening a Windows Server 2025 Active Directory environment — Group Policy Objects, Kerberos/NTLM authentication, LDAP, DNS — under a 4-hour clock, while professional red-team operators actively attacked the environment.

The role

Domain controller is arguably the hardest single seat on a CyberPatriot team: every other system’s authentication depends on it staying up and correctly configured, so a mistake doesn’t just cost your own points, it can break services your teammates are actively being scored on. A typical competition domain controller comes with 30+ user accounts, 5+ organizational units with different security requirements, deliberately misconfigured GPOs, and DNS integrated into the domain that can’t go down.

Nationals adds live attackers

Regular rounds are pure hardening — find and fix vulnerabilities against a static scorer. Nationals adds a red-team component: real security professionals actively trying to take services down while you’re still being scored on uptime. Techniques defended against include Kerberos ticket forgery (Golden/Silver Ticket), ASREPRoasting, Pass-the-Hash, and direct service disruption — meaning the job wasn’t just “harden it and walk away,” it was detect, respond, and restore service mid-attack, multiple times, while still finding new vulnerabilities to fix.

The result

1st place nationally, and my teammates voted me the team’s MVP. It was my third national title, after two in the Middle School Division, and the same year CyberAegis’s middle school team won its division too.