While teams still alive in the NCAA basketball tournaments dream of winning a national title, five students from Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School can shrug and say, “Been there, done that.”
Leon Gaulin, Jamison LaRoche, Jack Marabello, Connor Quick and Nicholas Sullivan aren’t the starting five of Monty Tech’s hoops team though. They’re the Marine Raiders, a team of Monty Tech students in 1st Sgt. Paul Jornet’s Junior ROTC program.
On March 14, they became national champions in the All-Service Division of the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot VII National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, held outside Washington. D.C.
Their national title came after teams from Monty Tech had placed second the past two years, making the Marine Raiders victory all the more sweet.
The competition focuses on cybersecurity — a technical field that is in high demand with the explosion of the use of the Internet in communication, commerce, government and military operations. The threats against those operations grow every day, and breaches can be devastating not only to individuals and corporations but to national security.
For instance, Target Corp. will be paying $10 million to settle a class action lawsuit resulting from a data breach in 2013 that exposed as many as 40 million credit and debit card accounts to hackers.
“We’re teaching these kids to defend against things like network vulnerability,” Jornet said.
CyberPatriot teams must solve cyber crimes and thwart threats using digital forensics.
“The whole challenge is supposed to overwhelm you, but I think our teamwork set us apart,” Marabello said. “We’ve all been friends for a long time, so we know how to work together.”
Just as the road to the Final Four in basketball begins with the regular season, so did the Marine Raiders’ path to the CyberPatriot finals. The competition began in October with more than 1,000 teams from all 50 states. The field narrowed to the 13 teams that vied for national titles on March 11-15 in National Harbor, Md.
The Monty Tech students were each awarded $4,000 in scholarships, with half coming from the Northrop Grumman Corp. and the other half from the National Security Agency.
This is a national title the entire school community should take pride in. It is further proof that Monty Tech is preparing students for jobs in a workforce that demands highly technical skills. Congratulations to the the Monty Tech Marine Raiders, and their coach, 1st Sgt. Jornet.