From zero to the top in 18 months: How to get involved with CTFs, grow your skills, celebrate your successes, and enjoy every moment of it

In Spring 2022, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute did not have an active CTF team. Three semesters later, in Fall 2023, we were ranked the #1 school in the country in the National Cyber League Cyber Power Rankings, the top among the over 500 colleges and universities that participated in that season of the NCL.

In this talk, we discuss how we grew our CTF team over the last two years. We provide actionable items for anyone looking to get started in their cybersecurity journey with CTFs.

For schools, we will provide a proven strategy for developing and maintaining a sustainable student-run and led (and faculty-supervised and sponsored) CTF team. We will showcase how we do things in the Rensselaer Cybersecurity Collaboratory at RPI: from weekly meetings to developing content to the big weekends to getting students to move up from new player to teacher and peer mentor. We will show how we developed a welcoming environment for everyone and how we are using CTFs to build the cybersecurity world of the future. And how you can be a part of that exciting future too.

For individuals, whether you are a student at school or someone looking to play by yourself or with friends, we will provide a method for building up your personal brand using CTFs so that no matter whether you participate just for fun or are looking for a cybersecurity job, your CTF experience will work for you.

We believe that CTFs are fun for people of all skill levels and we will get you excited and prepared to start your own cybersecurity journey with CTFs. If you don't know where to start, start with us!