CyberVoices

Started in 2017 as the Canadian centre of excellence in the US Air & Space Force Association’s international CyberPatriot competition, CyberTitan has grown year on year, slowly spreading across Canada’s fractured education landscape. Canada has a fractured education landscape? Our country is the only developed country in the world without a national education strategy. Depending on where you are, you might be enjoying one of the top education systems in the world or one on par with developing countries. “Canadian education” looks good on international tests because the big provinces swing the average with their populations.

Attempting to engage this fractured landscape with cybersafety, data privacy and cybersecurity digital skills is a massive challenge. ICTC, the Information and Communications Technology Council, took that challenge on in 2017 and to date over seven thousand students have participated with many graduates going on to careers in the field.

How strong are Canadian teams? Canada is the only country outside of the U.S. to send students to the CyberPatriot international finals in Maryland and has done so consistently. When we provide the resources, Canada produces top tier cyber-talent!

CyberPatriot was developed in 2009 and still depends on pre-cloud technology to function. Teachers are emailed links to zip files that they have to download, unpack virtual machines from and run locally on computers. This is part of the challenge in engaging Canadian education with CyberTitan because many schools have moved to Chromebooks that can’t run local VMs or the Cisco Packet Tracer network design software it uses.

In 2020 When COVID swept through, ICTC looked for ways to keep CyberTitan national finals alive. While all other student competitions shut down, ICTC found Field Effect and migrated their planned live competition onto their cloud based cyber-range. This allowed Field Effect to create virtual networks rather than having students work on lone virtual machines. Being able to understand network management and security on a live, interactive virtual cyber range means CyberTitan can teach cybersecurity from a real-world perspective.

Putting together a competition like this is hard work. With every school board in every province doing their own thing, and every province and territory also doing their own thing, the digital divide in Canada is as wide as that regional educational divide. If you’re lucky, your child’s school has a digitally literate teacher covering ICT and cyber courses, but those schools are a vanishingly few (no national strategy, remember?).

ICTC searches for these cyber-education unicorns and gets them into CyberTitan so that students can learn about opportunities and career pathways in the field, all while developing essential defensive cyber-skills on Windows, WINServer and Linux systems. CyberTitan also works with other federal programs like Computers for School Plus, which provides technology for classrooms that otherwise couldn’t afford it. In a review this past season it was estimated that over 80 percent of the CyberTitan student teams couldn’t have participated without CFS+ support. We depend on charity to cross the digital divide in Canada.

These federal efforts to provide equitable access to technology education exist outside the provincially run ministries of education. Only New Brunswick has adopted a province-wide approach to cyber-education. In every other region we have to knock on doors from the outside hoping to find a teacher willing to take this on with no provincial support.

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE-CST) has been CyberTitan’s primary sponsor since 2020 and without their continued support the program would be in peril. Field Effect also provides lots of in-kind funding to make national finals happen. Other regular partners like KPMG, Inspiretech, the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity at University of New Brunswick, and the Cybersecurity & Privacy Institute at the University of Waterloo have helped CyberTitan, but this year, with support from CCN, CyberTitan has an expanded group of sponsors.

Putting on a competition like this on a shoestring is never easy. This year the University of Waterloo had its laptops stolen in the weeks leading up to the live event. How did Canada’s burgeoning cybersecurity community respond? Renewed Computer Technology Ontario (RCTO), the Ontario branch of Computers for Schools, pulled a rabbit out of the hat by providing us with laptops for students to use with less than a week’s notice. We were also stuck covering the costs of transportation and residence for competitors, but CCN members stepped up and made it happen. This is what community and collaboration looks like moving forward in Canada: government, industry and academia all working to make cybersecurity more accessible to every Canadian child.

What does CyberTitan dream of doing in the future? Expand and cross the digital divide so every Canadian student experiences cyber-education in public school. Wouldn’t every cybersecurity professional in Canada love to see a more cybersecurity aware population? CyberTitans go home and support their families and communities with their newfound skills. This outreach also shows students with the aptitude and interest how to access often-hidden cyber career pathways; this is a home-grown solution to Canada’s cyber-skills gap!

This year Cadets Canada rejoined CyberTitan after a COVID absence. Thirty teams from across the country engaged in the competition and Cadets Canada is keen to integrate cybersecurity into its training syllabus moving forward, meaning young adults thinking about careers in the military and government would get hands-on experience with essential cyber-skills, opening up possibilities.

CyberTitan just came shy of its 200 team target this year. At 5-6 students per team, that means over a thousand students participated in the seventh rendition of CyberTitan, and the top scoring schools spanned the country from Edmonton to Winnipeg and Toronto to Fredericton. There are over two million Canadian students in middle and high school, so CyberTitan is reaching less than 0.005% of them – then we wonder why Canada faces a shortage of cyber-talent.

CyberTitan is a proven mechanism for developing Canadian cybersecurity talent. It leads to CyberSci, the post secondary student cyber competition, and many CyberTitan alumni can now be found working in industry, post-secondary research, and the military. With CCN’s collaborative focus, lets see if we can expand this opportunity to more rural and diverse students and, like the CCN, create a grass roots solution to Canada’s cybersecurity challenges!