Blog Details

Event Dates: July 18-19, 2024

Location: Canberra, Australia

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a 24-hour Capture the Flag (CTF) event organised by the ASD-ANU Co-Lab. The Co-Lab is a collaboration between the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Australian National University (ANU), the collaboration focuses on research into national security challenges facing Australia.

Event Highlights

The event covered a wide range of topics, including:

  • Cryptography
  • Languages
  • Programming
  • Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)
  • Cyber Security
  • And more...

Team Participation

I participated in the event with Alex, a co-worker from Synergy. Together, our team "ERR: 418" captured 13 flags, placing us 30th out of 171 teams.

Achievements:

  • We were one of 6 teams to successfully capture all 7 OSINT flags.
  • We uncovered 2 of 3 steganography flags.
  • We captured 2 of 7 Digital Forensics & Incident Response (DFIR) flags.
  • We also captured 1 web flag.

Personal Reflections

As I continue my journey towards entering the cybersecurity workforce, I am incredibly proud of my team's efforts. This experience highlighted some areas I need to improve, specifically digital forensics and web security. I’m keen to continue learning digital forensics as I proceed with my Blue Team Level 1 certification, and I’m excited to find some time to dig into web security.

Read My Write-Ups

If you're interested in detailed write-ups on some of the challenges I completed, please visit the following links. More links will be added as I finalise my write-ups: