⚔️ CyberTexas Foundation CyberPatriot Advanced Camp – Day 3 ⚔️

🌎 Exploring the World's Digital Battlefield & Hunting Like a Cyber Viking

"A Viking never sails into unknown waters without first scouting the horizon. The same is true for cybersecurity."

Day 3 of the CyberTexas Foundation CyberPatriot Advanced Camp was all about seeing the bigger picture—literally.

Before you can defend a computer, you first need to understand how the entire world stays connected.

🌊 Sailing Across the Digital Seas

When people think of the Internet, they often picture "the cloud."

In reality...

☁️ The cloud is built on cables.

We kicked off the morning by exploring the massive network of undersea fiber-optic cables stretching across the oceans that carry the vast majority of the world's Internet traffic.

From streaming your favorite shows...To online banking...To cloud computing...To video games...To CyberPatriot competitions...

...most of it travels through thousands of miles of fiber lying on the ocean floor.

🛰️ We also talked about the communications satellites orbiting Earth and how they provide connectivity for remote areas, ships at sea, aircraft, emergency responders, and military operations.

Then we shifted our perspective from builders...

...to attackers.

💀 A cybercriminal sitting thousands of miles away on another continent can use this same global infrastructure to attack organizations around the world.

Students also learned how undersea cables have become critical infrastructure and how damage—whether accidental or intentional—can impact communications, businesses, and even national security.

The Internet really is one giant connected world.

🛡️ Every Viking Scouts Before the Battle

Once we understood the battlefield...

...it was time to learn how defenders prepare for battle.

One of the biggest mistakes new CyberPatriot competitors make is immediately changing settings the moment they open an image.

Professional defenders don't do that.

Neither do Cyber Vikings.

⚔️ First... investigate.

⚔️ Then... understand.

⚔️ Finally... act.

Whether working on a CyberPatriot Windows image or a Cisco Networking challenge, students learned that successful competitors always begin with reconnaissance and threat hunting before making a single change.

Instead of deleting files or disabling services immediately, they learned to answer questions like:

🛡️ Is this process supposed to be running?

🔎 Who launched it?

📂 Where is it running from?

🌐 Is it communicating across the network?

⚙️ Is it configured to start automatically?

The best defenders collect evidence before making decisions.

📖 New Cyber Viking Field Manuals

To help students throughout camp—and future CyberPatriot competitions—I handed out two new reference guides that I created.

📘 Windows 11 Hardening, Threat Hunting, Hidden Files, Processes, and State Round Command Guide

📗 Windows 11 Hardening and Threat-Hunting Commands

Together, these guides give students an extensive collection of Command Prompt and PowerShell commands for investigating Windows systems before making changes. They include techniques for:

🧑‍💻 Finding unauthorized users

📁 Discovering hidden files and scripts

⚙️ Investigating running processes and services

📅 Hunting through scheduled tasks

🚪 Finding persistence mechanisms

🌐 Examining network connections and listening ports

🛡️ Reviewing Microsoft Defender and Firewall settings

📜 Searching Windows Event Logs

🔐 Verifying PowerShell history and file hashes

The guides reinforce one of the most important principles in cybersecurity:

Not everything suspicious is malicious. Collect evidence first. Understand what you're seeing. Then make informed decisions.

Those are the habits that turn CyberPatriot competitors into real-world cyber defenders.

🍕 Lunch Report

Now for today's most important statistic...

📱 Only TWO phones were left behind during lunch!

I'm both impressed...

...and a little disappointed. 😂

The campers are clearly remembering our daily reminders.

Even during lunch, the cybersecurity discussions continued.

We had some fantastic conversations about:

📲 Near Field Communication (NFC)

🍎 Apple AirDrop

💻 Windows

🔒 How secure wireless communication actually works

One of my favorite parts of camp is that learning doesn't stop when class does.

🔍 Threat Hunting with Sysinternals

After lunch, students were introduced to one of my favorite Windows security tools...

🔎 Microsoft Sysinternals Process Explorer

Think of Task Manager...

...after years of Viking training.

Process Explorer gives defenders incredible visibility into Windows.

Students learned how to investigate:

🧬 Parent and child process relationships

📂 Executable locations

📝 Command-line arguments

✅ Digital signatures

📚 Loaded DLLs

🔗 Open handles

📊 Resource utilization

More importantly, they learned how Process Explorer helps identify malware hiding inside a Windows image.

CyberPatriot competitors frequently encounter malicious programs disguised as legitimate Windows processes.

Process Explorer helps answer questions like:

⚠️ Is this process running from AppData?

⚠️ Why is PowerShell launching from the Temp folder?

⚠️ Why did explorer.exe start cmd.exe, which launched another executable?

⚠️ Is this executable digitally signed?

These investigative techniques are exactly what professional threat hunters use every day.

🎤 Guest Speaker Spotlight

One of the highlights of Day 3 was welcoming our guest speaker...

👨‍💼 Mr. Paul Guerra

Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)

Rackspace Technology

Paul shared his incredible career journey and explained what it's like leading cybersecurity for a global technology company.

Students learned about:

☁️ Enterprise cloud security

📈 Managing cyber risk

🛡️ Incident response

🌍 Protecting organizations around the world

🏢 Building large security organizations

Paul also discussed several of the major cyber incidents that have shaped today's threat landscape and emphasized how cybersecurity leaders balance technology, business operations, resilience, and trust.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway was hearing firsthand that cybersecurity is a career built upon continuous learning, curiosity, and teamwork.

Thank you, Paul, for investing your time in our students and inspiring the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

🦅 Thank You, CrowdStrike Volunteers!

A huge Cyber Viking salute goes out to our incredible CrowdStrike volunteers!

⚔️ Thank you for mentoring students throughout the day.

⚔️ Thank you for answering countless questions.

⚔️ Thank you for helping run our Remote Access Attack Lab.

Students were able to see how remote access attacks work, how attackers establish persistence, and—most importantly—how defenders investigate and stop these attacks.

Hands-on experiences like these transform classroom concepts into practical cybersecurity skills.

Your passion and dedication made a tremendous impact on our campers.

⚔️ The Viking Voyage Continues...

We're now halfway through Advanced Camp, and it's exciting to watch these students grow more confident every day.

They're no longer just learning commands.

They're learning to think like investigators.

To ask questions.

To collect evidence.

To understand systems.

And to defend them.

That's what it means to...

⚔️🛡️ CYBER LIKE A VIKING!  🛡️⚔️