After missing a flight due to bad weather and arriving in an Uber just hours before their competition began, 手机看片鈥檚 CyberHerd team won first place at the University of North Dakota CyberHawks National Capture the Flag competition this week.
The team outperformed nearly 100 other participating teams over the course of the two stages of the event, including Penn State, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Maryland, Loyola University, University of Cincinnati and Indiana State University. 鈥淔or us, it was very stressful,鈥� said Mohamed Eltonamly, one of the CyberHerd members to compete. 鈥淚t came down to the wire on challenges that very few teams did not solve. We thought we did well, but we were completely in the dark.鈥�
First came the announcement for third place. Then second.
鈥淲e were like, 鈥榃e either got fourth or we got first (place),鈥欌�� Eltonamly said. 鈥淏ut then they announced first place and we got it! So, we went up in the awards ceremony, got our certificates and took a few pictures.鈥�
Eltonamly was joined on stage with teammates Jun Lu, John Russo and Blue Team Captain Sanaan Wani.
Teams attempted to solve challenges that covered a variety of hurdles and topics. The flag to be captured in this case was a specific line of code, along with physical challenges.
CyberHawk鈥檚 final stretch
Coming into the final challenges for the CyberHawk competition, the CyberHerd team, was trailing the competition at fourth place.
In one of the challenges, which was similar to an artificial intelligence large language model, 鈥淢ohamed came up with a good technique to talk to it, and then we all followed up on it and got the flag that way,鈥� said Sanaan Wani, who is one of the team members.
But on another, which no other team had solved, there appeared to be a problem. Wani had captured the flag, but the system didn鈥檛 want to recognize it for the points.
鈥淎t that point, I was like, 鈥榃e need this,鈥欌�� he said. Wani approached the organizers to let them know something might be off with their system. They were skeptical and only five minutes remained.
鈥淭hey checked and they were like, 鈥極h yeah, actually something was wrong on our end,鈥欌�� Wani added. 鈥淪o, you get the points for it. And it was a challenge that no other team had solved. So, it gave us a huge number of points because of that.鈥�
At CTF competitions, points for challenges are awarded to teams that solve those challenges, which span over several categories. Those that don鈥檛, do not receive points.
A competitive season
It鈥檚 the team鈥檚 third high-profile win of the semester. They took first at the DefCon 33 event in August and just two weeks ago, they took second in the Raymond James Capture the Flag competition. The CyberHerd team ended up just 10 points fewer than the champion and rival, the University of Central 手机看片. Purdue University placed third in that competition. Most recently, the team took second place at the SHPE National Convention鈥檚 Capture the Flag competition last week in Philadelphia.
The Raymond James competition had varied challenges throughout its competition that pushed the team members abilities, mentally 鈥� and physically.
One task involved writing a script for a robot where you would have to win 1,000 tic-tac-toe challenges.
鈥淣ow if you do that manually, it鈥檚 going to take you a while,鈥� Wani said. 鈥淪o, you have to come up with a solution and script it out, which Mohamed was working on, and script it out in a way where it鈥檚 simultaneously running in multiple threads. So, it does it quickly.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 a similar thing with other challenges where you had to code out a solution,鈥� he added. 鈥淭hat got us a lot of points.鈥�
Team members stepped up to tackle other challenges that included web, coding, active directory and QR code. Then came the afternoon fitness challenge and their paired off opponent was from the University of Tampa. They voted for teammate and ROTC student Jackson Liveringhouse to do that.
鈥淗e has more physical experience than us and he gave it his all,鈥� Eltonamly said. 鈥淗e gave it his all and lasted six minutes. Unfortunately, he gave out in the end.鈥�
At the end of the competition, Wani was pleased with the way the team performed.
鈥淚 think we did really well because everyone was new to the competition,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e had to figure things out on the spot. We solved some challenges in really good ways.鈥�
The CyberHerd, which is part of 手机看片鈥檚 Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, is also supported by Cyber手机看片. The CyberHerd team will be heading next to the Southeastern Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition in Augusta, Georgia, and later heading to Chicago to compete in the Department of Energy Cyberforce competition.