Learn about one of the most exciting Tech Careers and defend against security vulnerabilities in the SoCal Cyber Cup Challenge.
In order to participate, you must be a middle, high school, community college, or university student in one of the California counties of Imperial, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego. If you qualify, please have your school's coach/faculty representative email njones2@nu.edu to register your school. Your coach will be provided with game codes that you can use to sign up.
Participants will be given access to a Practice Round to prepare for the Qualifier Round. Participants who meet the score requirement of the Qualifier Round will progress to the Final Round. The Challenge will immerse students to solve a variety of cybersecurity challenges that range from incident response to web application security. The Challenge will incorporate scenarios that are designed to replicate the same day-to-day tasks of professionals in the cybersecurity field. These scenarios span a variety of disciplines and could require students to conduct an incident response investigation with provided artifacts, develop computer programs to break/validate custom authentication mechanisms, encrypt/decrypt communications with known protocols, defend against malicious attackers, and more.
After you register, set up your teams by accessing the "SoCal Cyber Cup Qualifier Round" level. Click on the "Access Level" button and then use the "Team Info" section in the right column to configure your team. Teams may consist of 3 to 8 students.
This includes cyberskyline.com or any of the CTF infrastructure, including external communication channels and other platforms associated with the CTF. You should only attack specifically designated targets in your assigned challenges. If you believe you have found an unexpected vulnerability, please submit a ticket.
Each user has a limited number of submission attempts for each question during the event. There are no point penalties for an incorrect submission, but attempting to brute force flag submissions is explicitly prohibited and may be interpreted as malicious activity. It is not necessary.
This is a team competition. You may collaborate with members of your team, but no one outside of your team. Scripts or flags should not be shared outside of the team – any violation of this rule will disqualify the entire team.
Using online resources is OK. Every participant is free to use any outside resources they have at their disposal in order to solve problems but should not search or ask (e.g. on StackOverflow) for the solutions to specific problems.
Do not post solutions online. People of varying backgrounds and skill level are anticipated to join this CTF, we are all here to learn; be respectful of each other.
Each challenge is worth a fixed number of points. You get points by solving challenges. Any malicious acts that violate the spirit of the competition will disqualify the user from the competition. The person with the most points at the end of the competition wins. Explore, learn, have fun!
Submit a ticket through the Cyber Skyline platform (“Support” tab) if you have any questions or comments for us, we are always looking to improve the challenge!
Communication will be sent out regarding specific rules for the Qualifier Round and the Final Round.