Whitehatters Computer Security Club

In 2020, I was elected to serve as the Whitehatters president. With many of the 2019 officers returning, the team was looking forward to continuing the progress we had made. The year started out strong, with one of the largest turnouts at our CTF meetings in years!

This semester we held four weekly meetings: Blue Team meetings, Beginner's CTF, Friday presentations/extra practice, and Saturday competitions/practice. We also put together a formal competitive team with practice requirements to attend limited-participation competitions. I served as the team captain and organized the training and competitions. Before the competitive team stopped meeting in-person due to COVID-19, we reached 8th in the US on CTFTime, vastly surpassing my expectations for the first semester. Without the in-person meetings, however, the team lost the motivation to compete so rigorously.

The Blue Team also made major strides. They built a new training environment from scratch using servers donated to the club. Documentation was created for all of the services hosted by WCSC, including the previously existing services. The constitution was also amended to add three officer positions (Secretary, System Administrator, and Public Relations) that were in effect but not yet officially recognized.

Shortly after, the COVID-19 outbreak began, and the university went fully remote. All student organizations were required to meet online as well, drastically changing the way we held our meetings. The officers, almost overnight, created a completely online environment for students. We created materials informing students of the changes, worked with the department to access remote meeting software, and revamped meeting plans to take advantage of the tools offered. Soon, our weekly meetings were held entirely through Teams.

Despite COVID-19, the university still planned to host the annual USF Cybercamp, a week-long camp for high school students to interact with cybersecurity professionals and learn introductory skills in the field. However, this year's camp would also be entirely online. I worked closely with the educators who organized the camp to help develop a curriculum that supported this format. We developed a CTF Track that would run alongside the camp and allow students to work on more hands-on activities in addition to the normal activities. This track culminated in a CTF on the final day developed by myself and a team of WCSC members.

The team developed challenges covering a wide range of introductory topics, including Linux, Python, web security, SQLi, forensics, cryptography, and networking. I created a few of the web challenges, coordinated the development process, and set up the CTF server. The PicoCTF platform was used to host the CTF. At the time of this writing, the CTF is still live here.

The first manner of business was getting the club website restored. The WCSC servers had relocated to the ENB building on campus and our website and wargame were still down from the transition. Unfortunately, the old CTF server was unrecoverable. However, the challenges were stored on GitHub. The wargame was rebuilt and the original challenges were refactored to function with the new system. A few challenges from myself and other members were added to the board. At the time of this writing, the wargame is running here.

After restoring our servers, I helped create an interim budget for the rest of the year. I also developed a transition guide during this period. This transition guide described the many activities for maintaining the club and the resources available for future incoming officers.