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The GHSCC CTF, Cyberstart America, Bruteforcing, and other fun :)

· 3 min read
Ayden Parsons
Ayden Parsons
Cybersecurity Specialist and CTI Analyst

(This blog post was migrated from my first, old, raw HTML/CSS/JS-only website.)

This post recounted my intense efforts towards winning the Michigan Governor's High School Cyber Challenge CTF, in addition to reflecting on Cyberstart America.

hydra_attack.jpg

Over the last few days (in addition to lots and lots of Eagle Rank work), I've been brushing up on my cyber skills in the "Michigan Governor's High School Cyber Challenge" (GHSCC), run on the Cyberstart America platform.

I had a lot of extra points from previous Cyberstart America seasons (where I scored high enough to gain access to the NCSF CTF, then won access to the SEC275: Foundations course from the SANS Institute [then passing the final exam, becoming certified]), but through the past couple of days I've jumped from 30,000 or so points, to over 52,000 points (each challenge at the levels I'm currently playing at are 600-700 points).

In the GHSCC, the top 10 teams (I'm flying solo :) ) in the Cyberstart Game, when the season ends, will win access to the 2023 SANS Core NetWars Cyber Range/CTF (which I have a keen eye upon winning [not really for any good reason, except it's {hopefully} more intense than anything I've done in a cyber competition before]). I looked up previous high scores from Cyberstart America to see how many points I needed to earn to be competitive, and found this photo:

Cyberstart-Round-2-5

From doing socket programming with Python, encoding and decoding, decrypting, website hacking, brute force password hacking with Hydra (referencing the photo at the top of this post), brute force zipfile cracking and directory scanning with Python scripts, to SQL and command injection, I've been putting in the work.

Thursday, 20:42 - J'aime utiliser les ordinateurs comme ça pour m'amuser.

21:40 - I just found the final list for a series of Cyberstart ranking lists I found earlier, and this is suddenly terrifying. Top score is 117,700 (approx 170 challenges, give or take a few), and score ten is 75,900 (DANG). I have a lot more work ahead of me ;-; (but, as always, "we do not do these things because they are easy; we do them, because they are hard.")

Note from the future: I didn't end up going anywhere or winning anything special from this because I was flying solo, and the competition simply ignored all solo participants and dropped them like litter. A couple of people were frustrated at that. But hey, I still had fun and learned a lot :)