President & VP of Windows

CyberAegis is a student-run cybersecurity education program spanning three schools — Oak Valley Middle School, Design 39 Campus, and Del Norte High School — with 100+ students in it at any given time. Its teams have been CyberPatriot national finalists ten years running, and in 2025 they won national titles in both the Open Division and the Middle School Division. Students don’t join a class; they join a pipeline: weekly training, internal competitions (“ICCs”) that double as skill checks, and eventually a seat on a real CyberPatriot team.

From member to president

I joined in 7th grade, when I was elected public representative. Since then: Windows team captain, wiki and infrastructure manager, VP of Windows (10th grade), and now — alongside still holding VP of Windows — President (11th grade, continuing into 12th). The dual role means I’m running the organization (scheduling, rosters, ICC assignment, coordinating five other technical VPs) and still the one architecting the Windows-side training content.

Building the training environments

The realistic part matters. A typical ICC isn’t a toy VM with one obvious bug — it’s 7-8 interconnected Windows and Linux systems with 3-4 real service dependencies between them: a domain controller, a web app on IIS talking to a database on a separate box, a mail server authenticating against Active Directory over LDAP, file shares bridging application and database tiers. My first fully self-architected ICC (“Arrakis,” 2025) was a Dune-themed enterprise simulation: a full Active Directory forest, an ASP.NET web app with an intentional SQL-injection path, a hardened PostgreSQL instance, SMB-over-QUIC file sharing, and roughly 150 automated scoring checks — plus a set of MITRE ATT&CK-based persistence mechanisms (AMSI provider hijacking, hidden scheduled tasks, service binary hijacking) for students to find during forensics.

Red team, not just blue team

During training sessions I run live attacks against the students I’m teaching — credential attacks, Kerberos ticket forgery (Golden/Silver Ticket), lateral movement, service disruption — the same techniques professional red teams use against CyberPatriot finalists at nationals. The goal isn’t to make training feel unfair; it’s to make sure the first time a student sees these techniques isn’t during an actual competition.