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Twenty-two students from the Cyber Leader Development Program and Unit 1819 participated in the National Cyber League Fall Team Open during the weekend of Nov. 7-9. “Capture the Flag” competitions provide teams of hacker's challenges to solve together as a group. Submissions for challenges create points, with the objective to accrue the most points before the competition ends.

A total of 4214 teams from across the United States competed. �����԰’s 22 students from were divided into 3 teams. The top team from �����԰ placed 92nd, an impressive finish in the top 2% of the competing teams.

Developing Cyber Leaders

Like other technical fields, cybersecurity requires problem solving, creativity, and teamwork to keep our information and assets secure. Capture the Flag competitions present a series of challenges for students to solve together. Challenges can include cryptography, web application security, digital forensics, OSINT [open source intelligence], and password cracking.

“I found the OSINT challenges to be just the right amount of difficult," says Michael K. Rupe. "There was often little to no information, besides a sparse or confusing photo to go off of, but with a little intuition and clever use of available tools, the team was able to push through and find the answers we were looking for.”

Password cracking is a computationally expensive activity requiring a large computer to run very intensively for what could be long periods of time.

“Initially I had no idea how I was going to keep my laptop from cooking itself during the password-cracking challenges," says Rupe. "Then I found two box fans in the classroom, propped the laptop on them, and just went with it. Hacking tends to reward the weird, improvised solutions anyway.”