📌 Haystack CTF: The Hunt for IOC’s | 2025 Link to heading

4th Position (Team of 2, out of 13 teams) at the Blue Team Capture the Flag event hosted by Texas A&M University System - WWT. In this immersive 6-hour blue-team operation, we analyzed logs, identified Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), and tracked threat actor “Leopold” using reverse shells and DNS-based MITM attacks. Our team solved 19 out of 25 sequential challenges, averaging ~18 minutes per challenge. We heavily utilized Security Onion with OQL queries to analyze network traffic and trace the attacker’s movement. The most challenging moment was identifying the DNS poisoning MITM attack, requiring correlation of multiple data sources. The event tested our blue-team skills in network analysis, threat hunting, and incident response using tools like Security Onion, Zenmap, Ghidra, and Burp Suite. Special thanks to World Wide Technology, Leah Salzman, Daniel Hartnagel, and Prof. Amy Hays. Sponsors: Palo Alto Networks, F5, and Texas A&M University System.

📌 Platform Engineering CTF: Build Your Own Kubernetes IDP | 2025 Link to heading

1st Runner-Up at the Capture the Flag event hosted by Akamai Technologies. This competition challenged participants to build their own Kubernetes Identity Provider (IDP), testing skills in platform engineering, Kubernetes architecture, and identity management. The CTF provided hands-on experience with cloud native security practices and demonstrated the importance of robust identity and access management in Kubernetes environments.

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