CyberHawks CTF at IEEE CARS
On October 27th, DSU students were presented with an opportunity to compete in University of North Dakota’s CyberHawks competition. Cyberhawks is a jeopardy-style CTF competition, where contestants tested systems and racked their brains to find virtual flags.
For those unfamiliar, Capture the Flag (CTF) in cybersecurity means a hacking competition where teams compete to solve challenges in areas like forensics, cryptography, web exploitation, and binary exploitation. It’s a lot like puzzles.
Six DSU teams qualified to attend the competition through a virtual qualifier earlier in the month. Team DSU Trojans grabbed third place in the university category, with other DSU teams following closely behind in the rankings.
Participants also got the opportunity to attend an Amazon AWS workshop free of cost. The workshop was based around AWS Greengrass, which is an Amazon service to build, deploy and instrument edge IoT devices. Participants completing the workshop received a certificate from AWS.
It was a very good opportunity for DSU students to represent their school, pick up some new skills, swag, and maybe a few connections. The event helped students kickstart their career in cybersecurity by introducing students to critical thinking, research, and some ins and outs of cybersecurity.
