We Ran A CTF Competition And All We Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Posted on 2025-07-02

On Saturday, May 24, 2025, we ran the NorCal Cyber Challenge in collaboration with Stanford Applied Cyber!

Background

If you were involved in cybersecurity competitions in a California high school, you might have participated in the Mayors Cyber Cup competitions (NorCalCyber, Inland Empire). If you don’t know what they are, these competitions are beginner-level CTF competitions aimed at high school and community college students in a specific California region.

For NorCalCyber Mayors Cup, the organizers (Sacramento County Office of Education/SCOE, SynED) do a good job of reaching out to schools that don’t have existing cybersecurity clubs, like the schools that participate in CyberPatriot; some people at Davis have mentioned that their first exposure to cybersecurity was through hearing about and participating in these competitions.

Mayors Cyber Cup usually runs on CyberSkyline (the NCL organizers), so they’re not making the competition themselves; it’s outsourced to someone with experience running CTFs. Unfortunately, for 2025 the competition was cancelled due to lack of funding from SCOE. (Source) Mayors Cyber Cup usually asks for a small registration fee to help offset the cost of the event, but this year it seems that there wasn’t enough money available to make it happen.

Y’know, it would be really awesome if some people who knew CTFs tried to put on something similar for free…

The Crew

Thanks to:

• Our sponsor Hacker Lab for making it possible to provide our winners cash prizes!
• Ethan for making most of the challenges!
• Ashley for providing the webexp challenges!
• Abigail for providing the logo art

The Challenges

The challenges for our competition can be found at: https://github.com/Eth007/nccc-challenges-public

We have partially completed writeups for the challenges; if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us!

Results and Reflections

We had 21 total teams compete, 5 of them confirming as educational institution teams.

Our winners were:

1. Half Dome @ Franklin High School
2. MVHS Infosec @ Mountain View High School
3. The Other Half @ Franklin High School

We’re still deciding if we want to make this a regular event. Our initial goal was to make this a stand-in for Mayors Cup, but trying to find schools to participate in our event is no easy task. We’ll wait on whether the NorCalCyber Mayors Cup ends up happening this year.

If they don’t, we’ll be waiting….