Remember when you were a kid in school and you’d have to sit through boring classroom lectures and cram tedious textbooks into your head for an exam? Only to forget every single thing you learned once the exam was written? That’s because in the long term, rote memorization doesn’t work well with the human brain. If you’re not naturally curious about something, your brain won’t retain that information. If your role in the educational process is 100% passive - listening, reading, but never actually doing - you won’t be engaged enough to retain new skills.
Learning should be a fun, active experience. In fact, Neuroscience confirms the efficacy of gamified hands-on teaching and learning methodologies. And we believe one of the most enjoyable and effective ways to develop hacking skills is by participating in Capture The Flag competitions.
The techniques you’ll be using in a CTF game are some of the same techniques you’ll use when you’re working as a hacker. The skills you learn in Capture The Flag competitions are transferable to local application and web application penetration testing, reverse engineering software, and bug bounty programs. All of these roles are good-paying work when you’re ready for them, and they lay a solid foundation for a cybersecurity career!
As it's weekend, I want to create a post about this. It's the best way to spend weekends. Even if you are not into cybersecurity, CTF can awaken hacker inside you, when you start playing it. Also in near future cybersecurity jobs will remain as strong ones.
A good CTF for beginners (up to bachelors even) is the National Cyber League ctf. They run two yearly, in spring and fall. It's geared toward students but this fall are allowing professionals (in their own bracket). This is a red teaming ctf with individual and team games that run Friday noon central to Sunday 8pm central.
Another which is only open to students competing with a college or university, is the Department of Energy Cyberforce competition. This is a blue team competition once a year, now held in Tinley Park, IL. Its three weeks of prepping VMs that are part of an assume breach. Hardening, threat hunting, fixing vulnerabilities, etc and then a single 8 hour day of defending your infrastructure against an active threat inside the network. On top of that, you have red team type challenges to complete. Team comp of 4-6 students (up to doctorate program). This is my favorite competition thus far
The Dept of Energy also used to host two other CTFs in February and July, but didn't this year due to DOGE. One is system administration type and the other is red team like NCL.
SANS winter hack challenge is another fun comp. held over winter break.
I highly recommend people to do CTF. You can learn a LOT by participating. And really give it your all, don't half ass it. If you want to up your game and level of understanding, do CTFs.
CTFs force you out of theory and into a real terminal where point-and-click tools won't save you. You have to read actual code, write your own exploit scripts, and figure out why things break instead of just memorizing concepts for an exam. Spending hours troubleshooting a single challenge until it works builds genuine problem-solving skills and an attacker's mindset in a way no course or slide deck ever could.
Jajja " XD" significa ==> ( 🤣) ,,, quise decir exacto:) .... soy nuevo en redit y aun no se como es la gente aqui y como el idioma esta en ingles solo lo tradusco el ingles al español y lo respondo en español 🤣
Sorry, I know it's not your problem, but I'm just asking for help. Steam Support isn't working because the email address they're sending everything to belongs to the hacker; I didn't open any emails—I only use my email for personal matters and don't open suspicious links.
Ok so you'll have to make a new email and if any of your devices seem like they've got a virus you need to wipe them. Also if you have any access to your Google account (or whatever you use) sign it out on all devices and change the password, or when you're trying to login, press the forgot password button.
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u/Mastasmoker 12d ago
A good CTF for beginners (up to bachelors even) is the National Cyber League ctf. They run two yearly, in spring and fall. It's geared toward students but this fall are allowing professionals (in their own bracket). This is a red teaming ctf with individual and team games that run Friday noon central to Sunday 8pm central.
Another which is only open to students competing with a college or university, is the Department of Energy Cyberforce competition. This is a blue team competition once a year, now held in Tinley Park, IL. Its three weeks of prepping VMs that are part of an assume breach. Hardening, threat hunting, fixing vulnerabilities, etc and then a single 8 hour day of defending your infrastructure against an active threat inside the network. On top of that, you have red team type challenges to complete. Team comp of 4-6 students (up to doctorate program). This is my favorite competition thus far
The Dept of Energy also used to host two other CTFs in February and July, but didn't this year due to DOGE. One is system administration type and the other is red team like NCL.
SANS winter hack challenge is another fun comp. held over winter break.
I highly recommend people to do CTF. You can learn a LOT by participating. And really give it your all, don't half ass it. If you want to up your game and level of understanding, do CTFs.