DoD Cyber Sentinel Challenge

I competed in the DoD Cyber Sentinel Challenge hosted by Correlation One earlier today and managed to get sub-200 in a field of over 2,100 participants.

One of my favorite challenges involved manipulating a JWT token to get a flag, and I was able to use a technique I just studied last week. In fact, the tab with the tool I used was still open in my browser.

I will say the most frustrating challenge involved finding the coordinates of a building in North Korea. I knew the general area, but the map on Google Maps was blurred and severely out of date. When I finally found the right coordinates, it was literally like throwing a dart at a dartboard while blindfolded.

It was a fun competition overall, and the difficulty was easy enough for most to snag a flag and hard enough to make you burn some gray matter. My biggest takeaway was to make sure I take notes and screenshots as I go through the competition.

I called myself "meditating" to rest my brain and come back to a problem, but I wound up passing out and waking up to solutions and placement pictures scrolling down my Slack chat. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go back and get the material I needed for write-ups.

But, meh, such is life. Congratulations to everyone who competed this year, and I hope you got a lot of "aha!" moments. I certainly did.