HHousen National Cyber Scholarship Competition 2021 Writeup

National Cyber Scholar with Honors Badge

Write-ups for various challenges from the 2021 National Cyber Scholarship Competition. These CTF challenges were used for both Cyber FastTrack and the National Cyber Scholarship Competition simultaneously.

For this cybersecurity competition, I was named a National Cyber Scholar with Honors and was awarded a $3,000 scholarship. Scholar with Honors is the highest accolade available through the NCS Competition, and is awarded to the top 30 National Cyber Scholars.

During the competition period, which was held from April 5th, 2021 12:00PM EST to April 7th, 2021 12:00PM EST, I placed 23rd out of 3,277 (top 0.7%) with a score of 6,150 points. I completed 76% of the challenges and earned 54% of the available points. Since then, I have solved every challenge and achieved the maximum score of 11,400 points.

The leaderboard is available here: National Cyber Scholarship Competition - Spring 2021 Leaderboard (Internet Archive)

Final Competition Statistics