Blog Posts

I did it. After all these years, I’ve leveled up high enough to unlock the “Real World” zone. Today I don my +4 INT cap and +5 WIS gown armor set and walk across into a new phase of life. What’s next for me?

The main competition that we look forward to in the club, NCL has both and individual and a team competition that we compete in. I’ll be talking about my experience in the games, as well as my thoughts.

In the cybersecurity club, we have a tradition that the board members would put together a CTF for the students to play every spring semester. What made this different from the King of the Hill is that this event runs for the entire week, has more teams, and more complex challenges. This was my experience with building out some of those challenges.

The yearly Hack-A-Thon put on by Utah State University. This year me and my team competed in the Tool Development category, developing a program we call “$hame”. The idea was that we want the terminal to cause more stress, and the more you misspell commands, the more you get punished for it. I’ll be talking about our experience in building the project, as well as my other thoughts of the event.

The Cybersecurity club was asked to change our attendance system (again). Since most of us in the club would much rather just use the official university login, I asked if we could poke around and see if we could find any vulnerabilities in the site. After getting the green light, I went through and found some… issues.

For Cybersecurity club this week, we built a knockout-style CTF to run for the hour. This is meant to be a warmup to get people excited about competing in NCL and the In-House CTF we’re hosting in March. I’m primarily focused on creating password cracking and network challenges, and I’ll talk about my process in building those out, as well as any other challenges I make.

I was asked to give a 5 minute presentation on the basics of network hacking for the Intro to Cybersecurity class. The goal was to demonstrate the importance of thinking like an attacker in order to defend yourself.

The Intro to Cybersecurity Class this week is learning how to use Linux. Since it’s still the beginning of the semester, it would be a good idea to have the club review their Linux commands as well. I put together a mini-CTF for the club meeting for students to hone in on their terminal knowledge. From changing directory to steganography, I hid 20 flag in a zip file for everyone to find.

The Cybersecurity Club’s collaboration event with the Baddies of Tech Club. We taught beginner cybersecurity topics, introduced some common website vulnerabilities, and exploited a few of them by hacking robots.

I taught the Intro to Cybersecurity class about some basic password cracking using Hashcat. Using basic knowledge of password hashes and common attack types, the students cracked both my MD5 and SHA1 hashlists by utilizing dictionary and brute force attacks.