Meeting Charleston

 Due to the pandemic going on currently I was not able to meet with any groups in the Charleston area. However, two weeks ago I competed in the national cyber league hosted by cyber skyline.

The National Cyber League is a biannual cybersecurity competition that consists of challenges designed to demonstrate participants ability to identify hackers from forensic data, break into vulnerable websites, recover from ransomware attacks, and employing other security methodologies and practices.

First of all, I will say that my experience of this competition was mostly enjoyable! First, we practiced the preseason game which was about 98 questions and tasks related to cyber security that we needed to attempt to complete. This preseason lasted a week and was initially quite easy until I got further into the challenges where the difficulty ramped up significantly. The main thing I learned from this first encounter of the NCL was that of the art of steganography or the art of hiding images, text, and files in different nonsuspicious type files. For example, the fact that one of our challenges were given an image and told that a flag was hidden somewhere in it. Steganography was new to me and finding these flags proved to be a great and fun way to learn something new.

Now, after the preseason concluded my score was tallied and I ended up being placed in the silver bracket for the individual ranked games.  (the middle bracket). I was excitedly surprised with as this was the first time I had gotten to utilize my cyber security knowledge outside of a school setting, and it turns out I wasn’t nearly as bad as I though about it.  The individual game was intense to say the least. While we had a whole week to dedicate work to the preseason we now had only 72 hours to answer about 150 questions and tasks. This had to be the most intense coding weekend of my life. I easily dedicated almost any waking hour that wasn’t spent eating to the NCL. All in all, the challenges for the individual game were mostly in the same topic however, their difficulty had been drastically increased. I notice under the wireless access section that one of the tasks labeled hard in the preseason was now drastically similar to a task labeled easy in the individual game. Once the competition was over I had achieved 65.8% completion status of all possible tasks in the competition. Something that I was originally upset with, but now looking back I am proud of since our Professor Dr. X who also competed in the competition was stumped on some of the same hard labeled problems as I was.

As a closing note I would highly recommend participating in the NCL as it was a fun and rewarding way to learn new topics and test my knowledge and command over what I already knew.