Placement: 4th position (team of 2, out of 13 teams) at the Blue Team Capture the Flag hosted by Texas A&M University System – WWT.
Core Focus: Six-hour blue-team operation analyzing logs, identifying Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), and tracking threat actor "Leopold" via reverse shells and DNS-based MITM attacks.
Results: Solved 19 of 25 sequential challenges (~18 minutes per challenge) using Security Onion with OQL queries, Zenmap, Ghidra, and Burp Suite.
Highlight: Correlated multiple data sources to identify a DNS poisoning MITM attack the most challenging moment of the event.
Placement: 1st runner-up at the Capture the Flag event hosted by Akamai Technologies.
Core Focus: Built a Kubernetes Identity Provider (IDP), testing platform engineering, Kubernetes architecture, and identity management.
Key Takeaway: Hands-on experience with cloud-native security practices and the importance of robust identity and access management in Kubernetes environments.
