All Net Connect cybersecurity tech Lance McNeese and a teammate earned gold medals at a cybersecurity competition in Atlanta, GA, last month, competing against 13 other teams from around the country.
Lance, who’s from Belle Fourche, and Austin Evans of Black Hawk entered as students from Western Dakota Technical College. Lance has since graduated, and he turned his internship All Net Connect into a fulltime job.
“It was a lot of work for two days straight,” Lance said. He and Austin solved problems at 10 workstations, working against tight deadlines. “It was very similar to working in a security operations center.” Tasks tested their skills in computer forensics, file recovery, threat identification, access control, network hardening and more. They even had to launch their own network penetration. “It was basically a hacking competition,” Lance said.
An especially tricky problem involved stopping a “denial of service” attack that shut down an entire network. “That was the signature thing that made me happy,” Lance said. “It validated what I learned in school.” He came home even more confident he could solve difficult IT problems and take quick actions to correct them. “Maybe I DO know what I’m doing!”
He does, but Lance also pointed out that at All Net he spends most of his time helping clients prevent those problems.
The competition was organized by Skills USA, a “workforce development” nonprofit that serves more than 400,000 students and instructors from middle school through college in all 50 states This year’s Skills USA conference in Atlanta featured competitions in 108 different technical fields. For example, Western Dakota Tech student Jantzen Fisher of New Underwood won a gold in the HVAC competition.