Cherry Creek High School · Denver, Colorado
We break things on purpose, so we know how to defend them.
Seventy of us meet every Wednesday to learn how attacks actually work, then go prove it at competitions across Colorado and the country. Most of us started knowing nothing. We teach from the ground up.
Since you opened this page
Automated attacks do not care who you are. They scan every address they can reach, testing every door until one opens.
Live, everywhere, all the time
Sample traffic, not a live capture. The techniques are the ones taught in meetings; the addresses are reserved documentation ranges.
Our job
We learn how attacks work so we can protect the people and systems around us.
Start learning cybersecurity. We learn from each other, practice together, and put those skills to work at competitions and in our community. No application, no tryout, no experience required. Everyone is welcome.
The count runs at about 7,000 a second, the rate in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024, which puts its customers alone at 600 million attacks a day.
Interest meeting
Sep 09
Wednesday
Then every Wednesday
Sep 16 · Sep 23 · Sep 30
Library Tech Center
3:30 – 5:00 PM
The season opener, and the one meeting built for people who have never done any of this. We walk through what the two halves of the year look like, how competition teams get picked, and what an ordinary Wednesday actually looks like — then you put your name down for whichever part you want.
Fall term · 2026–27
13 meetings · 5 CyberPatriot rounds
September
4 meetings
October
4 meetings
November
3 meetings
December
2 meetings
Come by once
No application, no tryout, no prerequisite — and nobody at the front of the room is a professional. We are a year or two ahead of you at most, which turns out to be about the right distance to be taught from.
In the room · one hour
Somebody in the club puts up a deck on one thing: how SQL injection works, what Linux file permissions actually mean, why a buffer overflow is possible at all. They wrote it. They learned it a year ago. Every deck we have given is on this site.
The rest of the hour is a lab. Same commands on every screen, at your own pace, with the person who wrote the deck walking the room. Nothing is graded and nothing is turned in.
Across the year · two halves
CyberPatriot. You are handed a deliberately broken Windows or Linux machine and you fix it before the clock runs out — bad permissions, unwanted accounts, services nobody should be running. We work practice images most weeks until it stops needing thought.
The room moves into a terminal and stays there. Reverse a binary, break weak crypto, pull a password out of a packet capture. This is the half that looks like hacking in a film, because it is closer to it.
Our competitions
Defence in the autumn, capture-the-flag in the spring. Any card opens the full write-up.
The National Youth Cyber Defense Competition, created by the Air Force Association. Teams find and fix security vulnerabilities on live system images against the clock.
Carnegie Mellon's capture-the-flag competition for middle and high school students, run entirely online.
An in-person spring CTF hosted by the Colorado School of Mines. Creek has won it three years running, 2024 through 2026.
Lockheed Martin's cyber competition. Creek took first place in 2025.
Our own competition, first held in 2025 with eight teams. Beginner friendly by design, and still interesting for experienced players.
An annual programming competition for high school teams, also run by Lockheed Martin.
The record
9 results · 4 first places · back to 2016
5 entries · 2024–2026
3×
first place · 2026, 2025, 2024
Aryan Gupta · Elynor Sykes · Cole Nielson · Brayden Cawley
Ruhan Sharma · Dagem Christian · Josh Castro · Noah Hellyer
Cole Nielson · Brayden Cawley · Elynor Sykes · Allie Doshi
Noah Hellyer · Aaron Weil · Aryan Gupta · Andrew Sautel
Ayan Vaishnav · Aryamann Sheoran · Ryder Whipperman · Elynor Sykes
3 entries · 2024–2026
1st
first place · 2025
Elynor Sykes · Brayden Cawley · Cole Nielson · Noah Hellyer
Allie Doshi · Cole Nielson · Brayden Cawley · Elynor Sykes
Elynor Sykes · Cole Nielson · Ayan Vaishnav · Allie Doshi
1 entry · 2016
2nd
nationally · 2016
Fisher Darling · Tyler Giallanza · Chang Lee · Eric Lindau · Kevin Park · Pranav Subramanian
Also, away from the scoreboard
Honours with no placement attached — members named in a round, rather than a team that finished somewhere.
2023
Scholars with Honors: Tate Hutchins
Scholars: Ryder Whipperman, Elynor Sykes, Ayan Vaishnav, Cole Nielson, Sireesha Athelli
2022
National Cyber Scholarship Foundation
2021
Finalists: Nathan Kawamoto, Tate Hutchins
—
Scholars with Honors: Ryder Whipperman, Cole Nielson, Elynor Sykes
Scholars: Fernando Agudo Palacios, Andrew Sautel
Finalists: Aryamann Sheoran
Beyond competitions
Anyone who has sat through a phishing talk can give one. So we do — at libraries, retirement homes and elementary schools around Denver, all year.
It is the same material we teach ourselves, pitched differently: what a scam text looks like, why one password everywhere is the whole problem, what a kid should do when a stranger messages them. This is the part of the club that has nothing to do with winning anything.
Come teach with usJoin the club
That is the entire process. Bring a laptop if you have one; there are school machines in the room if you do not.
The room, the officers, what to bring, and how to reach us are all on that page.