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.
Ever since my first breath of NCL in Spring of 2024, I’ve been addicted to CTFs. With the goal to improve every year in both score, knowledge, and accuracy, I’ve enjoyed it all. This year was interesting, as AI had improved significantly compared to other competitions, and I knew we’d be competing against people with no shame. NCL accounted for this in the team game, and did quite well in AI-blocking the harder challenges.
Individual Game
I’m going to be honest, the individual game was… alright. I don’t have too much to say about it this year. It felt very heavily like “If I’m not using AI, I’m behind”, and not many of the challenges were AI proof. It was really demoralizing seeing people finishing 100% in the first 6 hours. I ended up placing 367th out of 7007, but there wasn’t any specific category that stood out to me as memorable.
Team Game
The team game was where I had a really good time. With the competition being during finals week, we had a hard time getting people on to team with us. It ended up being just me and Sam, next year’s club president and a good friend of mine. We kicked BUTT for just a team of 2. Ranking 74th out of 3638 teams in the nation, we finished the competition with a 96.89% completion and a 97.40% accuracy. The only 2 categories that we weren’t able to finish were Forensics and Cryptography. I seemed to be on the right track with the Cryptography challenge, but just couldn’t piece the puzzle together in time.
My most memorable category for the team game was probably OSINT. The last problem had me looking through kismet logs to find out if someone was following a vehicle while wardriving. It definitely felt more like a log challenge than OSINT, but I had some good fun over a good 4 hours working on that challenge. From identifying the tracker device to finding a crime that happened that same day, I thoroughly enjoyed that challenge.
Password Cracking for team game this year was kind of underwhelming. I clustered 3 gaming computers together with Hashtopolis to work on this challenge, but all of the challenges were able to be solved in less than a few minutes with the right wordlist. There was one interesting challenge in this category where we had to actually generate the hashes ourselves and find a hash with however many 0’s at the beginning that they asked for, but a script running md5sum on a bunch of randomly generated characters got it while I was working on the other password cracking challenges.
Overall Thoughts
I had a good time this year, it probably would have been even more fun if we had a larger team, but overall I’m proud of the work that the club put in this year.