The Whitman Middle Cyber Patriot Brute Force Team has advanced to the semifinal round in the Cyber Patriot XI competition scheduled for Friday, January 24. Team members Clifford Loos, Alec Vaughn, Suleman Waheed, Alyssa Martin, Sara El-Ghazali, Chloe Leiterman, Ryleigh Smith, and Mohammed El-Ghazali competed against 1,245 middle school division teams from throughout the United States. Teams are given a set of virtual operating systems and are tasked with finding and fixing cybersecurity vulnerabilities while maintaining critical services. The Brute Force team faced a number of difficult Network Security Challenges on Windows, Servers, Ubuntu, and Cisco during competition, completing three rounds of online competition. Contact news liaison Michelle Johnson at @email.