CTF Club: SeaTF

Our last event of the semester: SeaTF! After another successful semester of general meetings and competitions, this event was a great way to end the year. We had almost 70 competitors, catered from our favorite local Thai restaurant, and kept the energy in the room dynamic with the introduction of regular crises- exciting, timed challenges (shoutout to President Evan for the idea!).

Like last time, we included many easy challenges to ensure the event was fit for all experience levels, while still having various more difficult challenges. Some of the ones I’ve made can be found here. A few students contributed harder challenges as part of their capstone project for their degree. About every 30 minutes, we would announce a crisis which teams only had a few minutes to complete, like taking a selfie touching grass, a fast-paced cybersecurity kahoot, or quickly identifying a malware hash. For those feeling stuck on a challenge, this was a great way to encourage a break and re-energize them; I think we’ll definitely continue to do this in the future.

Overall, seeing our new, unknown club grow into an established community this past year has been immensly rewarding. Even during busy exam weeks, our general meetings still pack 20-35 members regularly, many of which have grown from being completely new to CTFs to being able to tackle our medium and hard challenges. This semester, we held exciting themed meetings like a treasure hunt, murder mystery, or easter egg hunt, and held two workshops- one on Ghidra and one on the OSINT Framework. We also hosted another CTF competition at the beginning of the year: Month[0] CTF. More details on these events (and pictures of our members’ smiling faces) can be found here.

I’ll continue my role as Vice President next year, along with most of our past board and two new eboard executives! I’m excited to come back in the fall with fresh ideas, more creative challenges, more new members, and the same dedication and enthusiasm for our club’s mission.