DoD Cyber Sentinel 2025
Event info: https://www.correlation-one.com/blog/how-the-cyber-sentinel-skills-challenge-prepares-you-for-military-grade-security-threats [June 14th, 2025]
Correlation One's 2nd DoD Cyber Sentinel CTF was originally planned for the fall of 2024. Their first CTF was in May 2024. David Morgan, Nathan Ord, and Christopher Haller (aka m4lwhere) returned as challenge designers.
Recommended 'tools' list: Audacity, Burp Suite, digg, Exiftool, ffmpeg, ffprobe, Google, Google Lens, Google Maps, Nmap, Hashcat/JohntheRipper, Python - BerleKamp-Massey, Impacket, Kali Linux, netcat/nc, OpenSSL, Cyber Chef, SSH, Terminal, Tor Browser, Volatility 3, Web Browser, Wireshark, 7zip, robots.txt! (Which is oddly eclectic.)
Out of 2,155 players and without taking hints, I ranked 126th. I completed 13 challenges (not counting the three tutorial ones) between 11 AM and 7 PM, though I took breaks for lunch and laundry. Ranks 104 through 128 were all tied at 1,675 points, so 24 of us likely solved the same number of problems. (Bonus: One player, Will Maxcy aka "Clempton", made a stats page of everyone.)
Issues: "ChatAPT" only had 35 solves due to resource issues. So Correlation One decided to scrap the points. This knocked at least one person (e.g. Eric Watkins) off the Top 10. Here's what the CTF organizer, Connor Donovan, said: "We attempted to scale up the backend capacity of the challenge, but we eventually realized that it wouldn't be feasible without effectively giving every user a Cloud-based vCPU core to run it on (who knew Google struggles to spin up 20 VMs with ~400 CPU cores in a last ditch band aid fix!)." The rest: Some official write-ups are available; Chris Haller has his on github and Medium. Player write-ups: Ryan Collier (rank 26th with hints), Caleb Streit (very well-written), Joshua Caplan (rank 332nd), Brenda Hensley (only wrote about "The Great Juche Jaguar GraphQL Heist" but it's excellent and David Morgan approved!), Brie Kramer (who mentioned issues amongst the players that I wasn't aware of), and lastly Richard Habib (aka Chopp_Sueyy aka "Rich Mix).
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