MOULTRIE, Ga. — Colquitt County High ROTC members will move to the second round of  CyberPatriot competition on Dec. 8 after competing for the first time in school history in the cybersecurity event earlier this month.

On Nov. 3, team members Kobe Dillard, Jose Galvan, David Grace, Kobe Kenney, Nick McDaniel and Master Yates spent six hours in the exercise in which they looked for vulnerabilities in a series of simulated computer networks.

Each of the 5,584 nationwide teams — 1,041 of them in the Service Division made up of ROTC members — were given a set of virtual images representing the networks. Over the course of the exercise they looked for potential issues while hardening the system and maintaining critical services.

“They’re given a problem set,” said Col. Paul Nagy, who heads up the Marine ROTC program in Colquitt County. “You have to solve information security problems for a major corporation.”

All teams in Georgia who finished in the top 50 percent of scores will move on to the second round, Nagy said. The Colquitt County ROTC members finished with a score of 140.37 points out of a possible 220.  

The team is coached by high school media specialist Cheryl Youse. Jay Pitts served as recorder.

Prior to the competition, the students studied coding, Linux programming and cybersecurity for a year in preparation for the event.