California State Round!

The first round that is on a Saturday took place! however- A scary round for most, if not all. This was the State Round, the first round of elimination! If a team did not make it above 20% of the state, they do not continue to Semifinals. After the recalculation, all Oak Hill’s teams were classified in the platinum level; that means that DigitalDogs, from the tippy top of Gold moved up to platinum!

Difficult round to say the least, most was expecting, some were going crazy. The images are, Windows Server 2019, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 22. Not only Virtual Machine Images, but we also had Cisco Packet Tracer and Cisco Networking Quiz, both add up to a total of 100 points!- That is the same amount as a normal OS Image.

Mr. Smith had let us know that some of the teams were already getting 100s on Windows Server, in the first couple hours, meaning if we wanted a chance of getting through we needed a 100 on Server. It was getting difficult to keep up, especially after everyone already used their scripts- and hitting a perfect 90 degree wall right away.

With Windows, many were saying that is was a difficult image from the previous images, but they pushed through! Highest in Windows was by Paige Garcia, in DogBytes.

The amount of security issues were insanely high, all the way up to 40 vulnerabilities. Which made it quite difficult to get points as most of the problems granted only 2-3 points each. Highest in Linux by Jacob O’Brien in DogBytes.

For this round the packet tracer had no score on them, no percentage on how well the contestant was doing, made if quite difficult to figure out if they were going in the right direction. so we do not directly know exactly where we all placed because we do not know how well we did on the Cisco’s Packet Tracer. hopefully well.

To Jonathan Jeong at the end of Competition: “how would you say how difficult was the packet tracer and the test? did you feel confident about it?” 🎤

Hmm I’d say it was a bit overwhelming to see multiple networks like this but then I realized I’ve seen this before in CCNA 2. It was difficult using all the skills learned up to now and beyond.
But over time and practice I was a bit more familiar and prepared to attack it towards the end – Jonathan Jeong

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WatchDogs

Ethan Mascoe working on Windows Server 2019 and Isaac Reyna working on Ubuntu Linux 22.

Mr. Smith mentoring Bryant De La Cruz in team CyberHounds.

While this may be our last time competing in CyberPatriot 2024, we all had a blast working in our teams. working together– acting like we know what we’re doing. We will end of our year, and continue over to next semester into Red Teaming, working together to not only defend, but to attack, to learn how to be an ethical hacker.

See all of you next year! Merry Christmas!