Challenges

Here you will find what is known as CTF or Capture The Flag competitions. The goal of these challenges is to utilize your cybersecurity skills to solve problems, uncover hidden information, and "capture the flag," which is often a piece of data or a code that demonstrates successful completion of the challenge.

What exactly is a CTF?

A CTF is a cybersecurity exercise that puts the player in a scenario where they practice their skills in identifying, exploiting, and mitigating vulnerabilities in a controlled and legal environment, often simulating real-world cybersecurity challenges. They usually come in 4+ Categories:

  • Cryptography - The art of breaking modern ciphers, encryption and other cyrptographic and mathematical primitives
  • Reverse Engineering - Attempting to reconstruct the source code from assembly language or an executable binary.
  • Web Exploitation - Using a variety of techniques to hack into websites to gain code execution or exfiltrate sensitive data
  • Binary Exploitation - Diving into low-level executables, and exploit common weaknesses in compiled programs.

There are also many other categories like Forensics, Blockchain, Hardware and other miscellaneous challenges. We at GradSec believe CTF challenges like these are a great way to practice and refine your cybersecurity skills

We release 2 tracks every semester. A Beginner track for someone who is interested but is still new to these competitions, and an Advanced track, for those who are more experienced in the art of capturing flags

By signing up with an account, you can save your progress and track yourself on the leaderboards. Each challenge is worth a certain amount of points based off the difficulty and at the end of the semester the contestant with the most points will win a prize.

P.S. You must be a current UMBC Graduate Student to be eligible to earn a prize

Good luck and have fun! If you have any questions or if you would like a hint, feel free to ask a question in the Discord! We will be more than happy to help out.