CyberPatriot is the premier national high school cyber defense competition that is designed to give hands on exposure to the foundations of cyber security. CyberPatriot is not a hacking competition. CyberPatriot's goal is to excite students about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.

In each competition round, students are provided one to three virtual machines. These machines contain several vulnerabilities, and students must clean the image of them. The virtual machines can have Windows or GNU/Linux Operating systems. They are given a set amount of time on the competition day to do so. Teams that find the most vulnerabilities pass on to the next round, and the winners of all three rounds compete in the National Championships in Washington, D.C.

The support from the competition’s industry-leading sponsors helps reaffirm the importance and relevance of cyber security. A generous grant from the program’s presenting sponsor, Northrop Grumman, made full national deployment possible. SAIC supplies their patent-pending software as the platform for the competition. The CIAS at the University of Texas in San Antonio (creator of the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) provides rich instructional materials for the competition. All of these sponsors ensured that CyberPatriot became a reality for high school students nationwide.