Took some time today to put SEC401 studying on hold in order to compete in the DoD Cyber Sentinel Challenge. This was only my 3rd ever CTF, the first two being nearly back-to-back in the early stages of the WiCyS Training Scholarship. I finished in 447th place which is quite ok. I did my best, learned some new things, and had a lot of fun.

There were some hiccups with this challenge. The whole participant password thing was a big issue, but the coordinators fixed it in fairly short order.

During the challenge itself, there were issues with being able to download different collateral needed to complete a challenge, and the coordinators fixed these issues as well, but I am sure it affected the outcome for some. I do think the reason for this was because there were just too many of us in the event. At least 2K were participating at any given time.

Additionally, some of the behavior in the Slack space that was given to us over the week before the CTF… well, there was so much room for improvement. Lots of bad behavior, either by just being unprofessional or simply unfeeling. Definitely could use more compassion. I appreciate that the staff did address this and then things seemed to calm a bit. The day of, however, there were some folx sharing code snippets that would render someone’s Kali machine fully unusable. That’s bad. I hope to never see it again. This is supposed to be a fun, learning experience.

At any rate, like I said, I did have a good time. I hope to compete in this again next year.

You can read how I completed some challenges on my DoD Cyber Sentinel Challenge project page. Thanks for reading!

PS: my fails below all involved the Inspo challenge. I could not get the correct flag for the location of the computer lab in Pyongyang to save my life! Obviously got it, but did take a few tries at Wikipedia for the correct coordinates! Bless me!