Two Academy CyberLancer teams, CyberLancers and CyberLancers Gold, vied in the first qualifying round for CyberPatriot’s National Youth Cyber Defense Competition.

CyberLancers members include juniors Janelle Inao and Wei Yi Huang and seniors Gaeun Kim and Hee Chun. They competed in a six-hour test of skills on Oct. 24, finishing with 133 points.

CyberLancers Gold consists of seniors Angelyn Tabalba, Kristen Kate Tumacder and Xuyan Zhang. On Oct. 25, the team of rookies competed for five hours, earning 67 points for Windows Server 2008 and 65 points for Windows 7.

Both teams are ranked in the top 300 teams of about 1,000 nationwide.

According to the web site, the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition allows middle and high school students to be “newly hired IT professionals tasked with managing the network of a small company.” Teams are given several virtual images that represent multiple operating systems, including Ubuntu, Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Teams must find vulnerabilities and harden systems. Teams also do their best to be able to compete in the national finals competition in Washington, D.C.

Teams prepare for the competitions through training in their Digital Engineering Honors classes and weekly training on Fridays with mentors John Galliano and Tony Dow. Galliano is an information security officer while Dow is the lead security engineer for Hawaiian Telcom’s managed security systems.

For Round 2, CyberLancers compete on Nov. 14 after school from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. while CyberLancers Gold plans to compete on Nov. 14 from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m.

The teams are currently preparing for Qualification Round 2 on Nov. 14 and the state round on Dec. 5 or 6.