National Cyber League Spring 2025

The National Cyber League (NCL) is a high-fidelity cybersecurity competition that tests participants on a wide range of skills, from identifying open ports to analyzing ransomware.

I am proud to share that in the Spring 2025 Individual Game, I placed in the 95th percentile nationally out of thousands of student competitors.

Key Challenges

The competition featured several categories. Here are a few highlights from my experience:

Log Analysis

One of the toughest challenges involved parsing through massive Apache server logs to identify a SQL injection attack vector. By using grep and awk, I was able to isolate the attacker’s IP and the specific payload used.

Cryptography

I successfully decoded a multi-layer encrypted message that involved a combination of Base64 encoding and a Vigenère cipher, requiring me to write a quick Python script to brute-force the key length.

Takeaways

Participating in NCL has sharpened my practical skills significantly. It reinforces the importance of not just knowing how tools work, but knowing when and why to use them.