CyberForge 2022

I LOVED this event. For those unaware, CyberForge is a Capture the Flag (CTF) & conference event held annually in Virginia. A CTF event is a set of challenges related in some way to cybersecurity, with categories such as web exploitation, cryptography, forensics, and reverse engineering, to name a few. It's basically a competition where you get to legally hack other people's stuff with a team and you have do it better than everyone else. The CTF part of the event lasted around 10 hours and I loved every minute of it. Before this event, I really didn't have any clue what I was getting myself into as I had never done a CTF before this, but after some reassurance from the rest of my team, we ended up doing pretty well. My favorite categories are definitely reverse engineering and binary exploitation just because I love looking at assembly instructions and then finding the best way to break stuff when I see a vulnerability. All of the categories were engaging, however, and all had challenges with varying levels of difficulty. The way the CTF was set up gave each team the same exact challenges, and assigned points based on the level of difficulty of the challenge.

I should note at this point that prior to this CTF, I had no formal instruction in the field of cybersecurity (And still don't to this day!), I really did just dive in head-first to see where it took me. However, that isn't to say that I was completely ignorant to hacking when I registered for CyberForge. All the way back in 2015 I had taken a passing interest in hacking (Let's be real, every teenager wants to be an edgy hacker at some point), I didn't really know where to start, so I just lurked around forums trying to absorb as much information as I could. A few months later in February 2016, I made an account on hellboundhackers.org, which to my surprise, is still around! For a few years I would hop on a couple times a week and just work on whatever challenges sounded interesting. Some of them were far too difficult for my overambitious self, but I did end up completing a decent fraction of the challenges at the time and even made some friends on the forums. Eventually, I enrolled at ODU and lost interest and time to regularly hone my cybersecurity skills, until CyberForge!

The rules of the competition allowed us a team of at most five people. So I got together my brother John, our friend Sebastian, and two other people who were looking for a team. We ended up doing really well and taking 3rd place out of 23 teams! The two participants that we picked up at the beginning of the event were completely new to CTFs and cybersecurity as a whole, so being able to walk them through what I was doing, especially during reverse engineering, was super rewarding and they both left with newfound appreciations for cybersecurity, which I am still very proud of.