Recent Posts
How to Start a CPTC Team
Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition is an amazing opportunity to experience penetration testing in its entirety, and I highly encourage participating to see if offensive security is a career for you. You need a team to participate in CPTC and this blogpost is meant to be a guide for schools that don’t have one yet, or are trying to revive one for next season. Last year my entire team from Cal Poly Pomona graduated, so I had to start from scratch and ended up building a team that won gold both internationally and in our own region. I want to share my leadership experience with others and hopefully inspire more people to participate in this competition.
Running a Discord Ransomware Gang
Have you ever wanted to build your own ransomware? I hope not. I am however fortunate enough to have an opportunity to be a menace on the red team of the Cal Poly Pomona SWIFT club’s Red vs. Blue competition. It’s very similar to CCDC and we’ve held it for years for talented Cyber Patriot teams from local high schools. For the first time this year we’re bringing it to our own school and we’ve built our own malware to spice things up for the Blue Teams competing. When learning a new programming language, one usually starts with “Hello World”, however that ain’t no fun, so I decided to learn Go by making Ransomware and things got a little out of hand.
HTB Cyber Apocalypse 2021 - Web
I’ve done a few CTF’s over the years and HackTheBox’s Cyber Apocalypse 2021 definitely was my favorite. 4740 teams of up to 10 people from all over the globe were unleashed on a huge number of unique challenges and our undergraduate team placed in the top 200, putting us in the top 5% of competitors, which is very impressive considering that the competition wasn’t just undergraduate students, but also professionals with industry experience. I was captain for my team and I focused solely on my favorite category - Web.
Global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition
The Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition is a one of a kind cybersecurity competition that trains students to be future consultants by letting them loose on a penetration testing engagement in a realistically simulated business environment. Teams of up to 6 students perform a penetration test against the fictitious business and document the findings in a penetration testing report.
TG:HACK CTF 2020 - Web
TG:HACK CTF 2020 has been very interesting and intellectually challenging. It made me bang my head on the desk repeatedly in the hopes of numbing the pain of not being able to solve some of the challenges. In the end, I managed to figure out all but the two of the hardest challenges. My writeups are intended to cover the whole process of solving a challenge, so if you don’t want a detailed explanation, just scroll to the payloads.