Clearfield High School was one of eight teams from across the country that participated in the CyberPatriot II finals in Orlando, Fla. (Photo courtesy of Dan Higgins)

Meet Matthew Bergin, a 21-year-old, recently engaged wine grape distributor from Bakersfield, Calif. Now meet Bergin’s alter ego Level, one of America’s most elite cyberwarriors, who can spend 15, even 20 hours a day fending off hack attacks from across the country and hunting for system vulnerabilities of his own to exploit.

Bergin is one of the hundreds of competitors who participate in NetWars, an online security challenge held roughly once a month. Each one lasts for a full week. Though advertised as a capture-the-flag-like “adventure across the Internet,” NetWars is actually part of a nationwide talent search known as the U.S. Cyber Challenge that aims to identify young Americans with the interests and technical computer skills to become the country’s next generation of cyberdefenders.

Cybersecurity is a largely unknown field of work often dismissed by the public as a creation of science fiction or fantasy. But as demonstrated by the recent series of attacks against U.S. government computers, like the July 2009 coordinated attack on Pentagon, White House and State Department Web sites believed to have been perpetrated by North Korea, the cyberthreat is real and increasingly urgent. In February 2009, right after his inauguration, President Barack Obama identified cyberspace as a national defense priority and ordered the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council to conduct a full policy review. The president has since also designated October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and appointed a cyber czar to coordinate the monitoring and protection of U.S. systems.

But despite the description of cybersecurity as “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century,” the U.S. finds itself in desperately short supply of manpower. Alan Paller, director of the U.S. Cyber Challenge, says he was once told by James Gosler, the first director of the CIA’s Clandestine Information Technology Office (CITO) and so-called father of cyberwarfare, “We have only 1,000 people with the technical skills to compete in cyberspace at world-class levels. We need 20,000 to 30,000 – now.”

The people answering this call to cyberduty aren’t necessarily computer science Ph.D.’s or the prototypical 4.0-GPA star students. In some cases, they’re just the opposite. “Our goal is to find individuals who have a high aptitude in this very particular arena, and those individuals are generally not the teacher’s pets,” said Paller, adding that many of the most successful participants are students with a history of getting into trouble for messing around on schools’ computer systems.

Bergin spent just one year at Bakersfield Community College studying Web design, but he credits his second-place finish at the NetWars all-star round to trial and error and a fair bit of training playing “Call of Duty” on his PlayStation 3. “NetWars is pretty similar to gaming,” he said. “It uses a lot of the same logic and strategy.”

The NetWars game is straightforward enough. It begins when players download a CD-ROM image and start it on their personal computer. They must then find a hidden key within that image and use it to enter an online environment where they earn points based on how well they attack and defend a set of cybertargets while vying against other players.

That’s the simple explanation, at least. Of the nearly 1,000 competitors who enter NetWars, Paller estimates that only about 30 to 40 have the skill level needed to even register a score. Bergin says that he reads piles of technical papers in between competitions to keep up-to-date on things like “reverse engineering malware” and “web app pentesting,” terms meaningless to laymen.

Competitors who manage to stand out, though, are sent to training camps taught by NSA and FBI trainers and mentored by a team of 70 volunteer professionals. Cash prizes, college scholarships and internships are also up for grabs as the Cyber Challenge gains more public visibility and credibility. Those opportunities may lead to future jobs with the government, military or industry as security analysts and network forensics experts.

One common fear is that by nurturing these talents, the U.S. is only creating an army of super-hackers that could turn against it. While most competitors admit they’ve dabbled with some hacking in the past, mostly just to see what they were capable of, NetWars is seen as a positive outlet to explore their curiosity legitimately. “This competition has no impact on the bad guys who are going to do it anyway,” said Paller. “But it could save some guys who might have become bad guys, and it will radically improve the security of our country.” Just as the military teaches soldiers to shoot a gun, Paller explains, cyberdefenders must learn how to exploit weaknesses to better defend against them. “Is it really awful?” he asked. “Maybe, but it’s necessary.”

Not all Cyber Challenge competitions are nearly so cutthroat. David Buckwalter, executive vice president of the Air Force Association (AFA) in Arlington, Va., oversees a slightly tamer version of NetWars for high school students called CyberPatriot. Instead of attacking one another, teams of students work together to analyze an encrypted image, identify network vulnerabilities and then repair them. The top eight teams in the country this year were brought to Orlando for the finals, where they were given more complex situations and tested by a team of mock hackers.

In its two inaugural runs, CyberPatriot was limited to Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corp (JROTC) and Civilian Air Patrol (CAP) cadets who trained sometimes up to eight hours per weekend to get ready for the finals. But, Buckwalter says, he has already been contacted by non-JROTC and private schools who are interested in getting involved next year.

While teens who do well at CyberPatriot can move on to NetWars or the Digital Forensics Challenge — the third Cyber Challenge competition sponsored by the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center — the emphasis is much more on generating enthusiasm among participants in science and technology and, well, having a good time.

“We can get a lot of attention through games and fun. It’s how we teach messages to children,” said Kevin Johnson, a certified instructor at the SANS Institute, the information security group behind NetWars. “It’s like Boy Scouts: You go camping and happen to learn lifesaving skills.”

Kit K. Workman, a retired Air Force major and the coach of this year’s winning CyberPatriot team from Clearfield, Utah, said in an e-mail that the competition has opened his students’ eyes to a whole new set of opportunities. “It was amazing to see them spark and work together as they learned.” He said that the $3,000 scholarship his team won inspired two of his cadets to pursue college who might not have before.

Regardless of how such programs attract interest, Buckwalter knows that teens will be a major part of America’s future cyberdefense strategy. “I’m astonished at how into this stuff these kids get,” he said. “I mean, I migrated into cyberspace as an adult, but these kids are natives. They grew up here. They just get cybersecurity inherently more.”