Competition Information

BrainHack is a unique, hands-on experience into the swiftly evolving world of digital tech. Dive deep into the exciting realms of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), space technologies, app development, fake news detection, extended reality and more.

Close to 3,500 students from some 90 schools participated in BrainHack 2023.

The Cyber Defenders Discovery Camp is a Jeopardy-style Capture the Flag (CTF) competition held during BrainHack 2023 by Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA).

To be completely frank, I found the challenges to be exceptionally demanding, even with my background in pentesting projects and my possession of the OSCP certification. This CTF encompassed a broad spectrum of cybersecurity domains, spanning from web security and OSINT to intricate logs analysis, and more. During the qualifying rounds, I was actually in Malaysia for a church camp with my friends. Despite the substantial time commitment that the qualifiers demanded, I willingly made the sacrifice to secure my entry into the finals. Out of the 26 challenges in the qualifiers, I successfully conquered 13 of them. While it was a tremendous honour to participate in the finals, I must admit that I perceived some of the challenges as excessively reliant on educated guesses. Nevertheless, the experience as a whole was undeniably incredible and highly rewarding.