After missing a flight due to bad weather and arriving in an Uber just hours before their competition began, USF’s CyberHerd team won first place at the University of North Dakota CyberHawks National Capture the Flag competition this week.
The team outperformed nearly 100 other participating teams over the course of the two stages of the event, including Penn State, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the University of Maryland, Loyola University, University of Cincinnati and Indiana State University. “For us, it was very stressful,” said Mohamed Eltonamly, one of the CyberHerd members to compete. “It came down to the wire on challenges that very few teams did not solve. We thought we did well, but we were completely in the dark.”
First came the announcement for third place. Then second.
“We were like, ‘We either got fourth or we got first (place),’” Eltonamly said. “But then they announced first place and we got it! So, we went up in the awards ceremony, got our certificates and took a few pictures.”
Eltonamly was joined on stage with teammates Jun Lu, John Russo and Blue Team Captain Sanaan Wani.
Teams attempted to solve challenges that covered a variety of hurdles and topics. The flag to be captured in this case was a specific line of code, along with physical challenges.
CyberHawk’s final stretch
Coming into the final challenges for the CyberHawk competition, the CyberHerd team, was trailing the competition at fourth place.
In one of the challenges, which was similar to an artificial intelligence large language model, “Mohamed came up with a good technique to talk to it, and then we all followed up on it and got the flag that way,” said Sanaan Wani, who is one of the team members.
But on another, which no other team had solved, there appeared to be a problem. Wani had captured the flag, but the system didn’t want to recognize it for the points.
“At that point, I was like, ‘We need this,’” he said. Wani approached the organizers to let them know something might be off with their system. They were skeptical and only five minutes remained.
“They checked and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, actually something was wrong on our end,’” Wani added. “So, you get the points for it. And it was a challenge that no other team had solved. So, it gave us a huge number of points because of that.”
At CTF competitions, points for challenges are awarded to teams that solve those challenges, which span over several categories. Those that don’t, do not receive points.
A competitive season
It’s the team’s third high-profile win of the semester. They took first at the DefCon 33 event in August and just two weeks ago, they took second in the Raymond James Capture the Flag competition. The CyberHerd team ended up just 10 points fewer than the champion and rival, the University of Central Florida. Purdue University placed third in that competition. Most recently, the team took second place at the SHPE National Convention’s Capture the Flag competition last week in Philadelphia.
The Raymond James competition had varied challenges throughout its competition that pushed the team members abilities, mentally – and physically.
One task involved writing a script for a robot where you would have to win 1,000 tic-tac-toe challenges.
“Now if you do that manually, it’s going to take you a while,” Wani said. “So, you have to come up with a solution and script it out, which Mohamed was working on, and script it out in a way where it’s simultaneously running in multiple threads. So, it does it quickly.
“That’s a similar thing with other challenges where you had to code out a solution,” he added. “That got us a lot of points.”
Team members stepped up to tackle other challenges that included web, coding, active directory and QR code. Then came the afternoon fitness challenge and their paired off opponent was from the University of Tampa. They voted for teammate and ROTC student Jackson Liveringhouse to do that.
“He has more physical experience than us and he gave it his all,” Eltonamly said. “He gave it his all and lasted six minutes. Unfortunately, he gave out in the end.”
At the end of the competition, Wani was pleased with the way the team performed.
“I think we did really well because everyone was new to the competition,” he said. “We had to figure things out on the spot. We solved some challenges in really good ways.”
The CyberHerd, which is part of USF’s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, is also supported by CyberFlorida. The CyberHerd team will be heading next to the Southeastern Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition in Augusta, Georgia, and later heading to Chicago to compete in the Department of Energy Cyberforce competition.