TAMUctf – Cyber Wise

During the Cyber Wise 2025 Student Data Challenge, TAMUctf will be hosting a beginner-friendly CTF competition. The competition will be available throughout the duration of the event from Thursday, February 27, 9:00 PM CST to Wednesday, April 16, 9:00 PM CST. Challenges are intended to solvable by people of all skill levels, so regardless of whether you have any prior CTF experience, it should be easy to get started. Additionally, this competition will help teach the foundational skills needed for the upcoming TAMUctf 2025 competition.

TAMUctf – Cyber Wise is a jeopardy-style cybersecurity capture the flag competition built and run by fellow Texas A&M Students for the Cyber Wise 2025 Student Data Challenge. The competition has been designed to have beginner-friendly challenges, requiring no experience.

You must be a current Texas A&M student to participate.

To stay updated for when registration opens + further information, join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/PnpRbUynVx

What is a CTF?

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competition. There are three common types of CTFs: Jeopardy, Attack-Defense and Mixed.

Jeopardy-style CTFs (TAMUctf) have a series of questions (tasks) in various categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary Exploitation or something else. Teams or individuals can gain points for every solved task. There are more points for more complicated tasks usually. The CTF winner is the team or individual with the most points when the game is over. A famous example of such CTF is Defcon CTF quals. Attack defense is another interesting kind of competition. Every team has its network(or only one host) with vulnerable services. Your team usually has time to patch your services and develop exploits. Then, organizers connect participants to the competition, and the wargame starts! You should protect your services for defense points and hack opponents for attack points. Historically, this is the first type of CTF; everybody knows about DEF CON CTF – like a World Cup of all other competitions.

Mixed competitions may vary in possible formats. It may be a wargame with special time for task-based elements (e.g., UCSB iCTF).

CTF games often touch on many other aspects of information security: cryptography, stego, binary analysis, reverse engineering, mobile security, and others. Good teams generally have strong skills and experience in all these issues.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the development team at [email protected].