I did the DOD Cyber Sentinel skills challenge. It was my first public CTF. By the end of it, I spotted a lot of my weaknesses ranging from not preparing my tools properly to not having a deep enough grasp of what I do know. I can somewhat get progress in some of the challenges, but then just get stuck in the middle. It had a variety of themes, but forensics and web-based played a big part, which were areas I was already sorely lacking in. I did some preparation doing HTB’s CDSA path, but I hadn’t internalized the material enough yet. Granted, after the competition ended, I understood how embarrassing it would have been if I put these skills on my resume, and I had these sort of gaps. I was even failing the network security ones, which I felt like I should have done better at. I liked the OSINT ones though where we had to find locations with just photos. On the upside, I ranked 178 out of like a thousand people which might be good I guess for a beginner.
The camp was fun. I got into the USCC East camp from one of their Cyber Quest challenges, which I did before I even graduated I think. I only had a basic grasp of cybersecurity back then. Not to say I’m an expert now, but since then, I think I’ve grown a lot from barely knowing just a few tools. Doing HTB Academy helped a lot. Anyways, the camp lasted about a week. It had lots of high-profile lecturers doing very firehosed but also insightful specialized cybersecurity lectures. At the end of the camp was a team-format CTF competition. I got to meet some nice people. I should get better at communicating though… We ended up fourth. If we gotten third, then we could have done the Cyber Bowl. I still have a long road ahead of me to being confident in my cyber skills.