CyberTitan Champions: Inside Canada's National High School Cybersecurity Competition (and CyberPatriot)
6/13/202637 min
Cybersecurity Today on the Weekend interviews the winning Canadian CyberTitan team ("S-ores"/a regex-based name) along with coach Phil, educator Tim, and CyberTitan manager Sheena to explain how CyberTitan (run by ICTC) connects to the international CyberPatriot program. They describe the competition mechanics—securing compromised Windows, Windows Server, and Linux virtual machines for points, plus Cisco Packet Tracer networking—and how Canadian teams compete through CyberPatriot before the top teams advance to a national CyberTitan final. Students Faye and Eric share why they joined, their learning "aha" moments in Windows tools and networking concepts, and the value of teamwork. The guests discuss teacher benefits, free training materials, building diverse participation, sponsorship challenges, and hopes for a fully Canadian program with regional events and cloud-based cyber ranges like Field Effect's.
00:00 Weekend Show Intro
01:00 Tim's CyberTitan Journey
01:46 ICTC Explained
02:08 Who Can Compete
02:42 Why CyberTitan Matters
03:22 Origins and CyberPatriot Link
04:04 How The Competition Works
05:09 Meet Team Sors
07:07 Coach Phil's Role
09:44 Why Students Join
12:08 Student Aha Moments
15:13 Community and Teacher Wins
16:34 Sheena Runs The Show
17:29 Scale and National Reach
18:51 Coast To Coast Growth
19:40 XOR Team's Home District
19:55 Teams Across Toronto
20:39 Trophies Medals Coins
21:22 Eric Why Join
23:04 Faye Encouragement Story
25:51 Teachers Start Teams
27:52 Building Girls Pipeline
30:40 Cloud Range Future
33:49 2030 Vision Wrap
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Shipley· Host0:00
This is Cyber Security Today on the weekend, and for our show today, we're bringing on the winning team from Canada's National Cyber Security Competition for high school students, known as Cyber Titan. And we're gonna get a chance to learn about this amazing program, how it ties back to a fantastic, a US military veterans association program called Cyber Patriot. We'll get a chance to learn from some of the students themselves and what they gained from the competition, and a bit of a hint about where it could go. If you're listening around the world, Cyber Patriot is not just a US program. It has participation from around the world, and there's a lot to gain from this interview. And if you're looking for a bit of hope this morning with all the dystopian headlines and latest breaches, sit back, enjoy a coffee or a tea, and hear some hope. I wanna start first with Tim. Tim, tell me a little bit about yourself for the audience so they can get to know you, and then we're gonna talk about this Cyber Titans thing.
Tim· Guest1:10
So I worked in IT for a long time in the '90s and early 2000s, and then got into teaching and taught technology as a teacher. In 2017, I heard about the Cyber Titan competition because I'd been using ICTC for statistics, and we ended up going to the first national finals that year, and then proceeded to have a run of students.