Secondary School

Capture the Flag Competition

The PeCan+ CTF is a “Capture the Flag” competition that allows teams of up to four students to complete a number of online challenges and find a “flag” (hidden code). The teams earn points for each flag found and the points earned is based on the difficulty of the challenges. The challenges were created by ECU Cyber Security students and were aimed at high school students for Year 10 and above. 

The ECU students ran introductory learning sessions for all participants on Saturday 10 September which allowed all participants to learn techniques on how to; crack Cryptography, Steganography, Reverse Engineering, Software and Web exploitation and Digital Forensics challenges.

This year we took along two teams. Our Year 10 team consisted of Srithan Puttagunta, Lucas D’Angelo and Gabriel Pereira and the Year 9 team was made up of Hudson Ding, Finn Stenning Alexander, Aarav Bhandari and Taj Hawkins.

The competition ran on Sunday 11 September against schools across Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Our team of Year 10 boys was entered into the intermediate level of the competition. While they didn’t take out the top spot this year, they performed very well against some highly experienced teams and finished up in 6th spot overall. Our Year 9 team also competed well in the beginner division and learned a lot of new skills that they aim to use once more in an upcoming CTF competition.