On the 15th and 16th of October, multiple students at Capitol Technology University competed in a Capture the Flag competition, hosted by SixGen labs.
The HACKBACK 2021 CTF Challenge is a 24 hour battle where teams are given a set of red team and penetration testing challenges with increasing difficulty. The goal of the HACKBACK Challenge was to explore the idea of “hacking back” nation states and individual hackers that attack our infrastructure.
Over a dozen Capitol students broke off into teams to test their pentesting skills against over 200 competitors, targeting everything from faux government sites to captured files and nation-wide energy grids. Unlike other CTF competitions, which are entirely contained in a web browser, HACKBACK utilized the site HackTheBox, which simulates websites and IP addresses for competitors to gain access to. Due to this, students were able to get realistic, hands-on red team experience by using virtual machines, scanning and enumerations tools such as Nmap, and a variety of open-source hacking tools.
Cyber Lab lead and student Jake Crowley placed in the top 15 out of all of the competing teams. Many of the competitors and students at Capitol Tech plan on attending many more cyber competitions in the future, representing the cyber battle team Signal-9!