📅 Date: 21–26 March 2025
📍 Location: Online
🎮 Type: Active Event – CTF
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to participate in Hack The Box’s annual Cyber Apocalypse CTF alongside two fellow trainees from my team at EATM-CERT (EUROCONTROL) and some friends. Set in the fantasy realm of Eldoria, this edition carried the theme “Tales from Eldoria”—a creative twist on cyber challenges involving dragons, ancient artifacts, and digital villainy.
With over 18,000 players and 8,000+ teams joining from around the globe, the competition was fierce and the puzzles immersive. The CTF followed the classic Jeopardy-style format, with 62 challenges spread across 11 categories, from forensics and reverse engineering to cryptography and web exploitation.
🧙♂️ Our Journey
Competing under the team name EATM, we kicked off strong—ranking in the Top 90 on Day 1. Unfortunately, as the event spanned a weekend, we couldn’t sustain our early momentum. After a strong Friday, our activity tapered off over Saturday and Sunday. By the time the CTF wrapped up on Tuesday, we finished Rank #614 out of 8,129 teams—not too bad given our partial participation!
👥 Team Performance Highlights
| Handle | Role | Challenges Solved | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| selimm | Member | 9 | 6,575 |
| Aelros | Member | 12 | 10,225 |
| 0zen | Captain | 6 | 3,800 |
| drq4 | Member | 3 | 2,475 |
| kebza | Member | 1 | 750 |
It was a great chance to test our skills, collaborate under pressure, and see how threat actors might think in creative, adversarial ways. The challenges were cleverly embedded in the Eldoria narrative, keeping the experience engaging from both a technical and thematic perspective.
🔚 Final Thoughts
While we didn’t climb as high as we hoped by the end, the event was an excellent learning experience. Participating in international CTFs like this helps us sharpen our problem-solving mindset and improve our collaboration under realistic cyber pressure.
Looking forward to the next one—and hopefully holding our top 100 rank a little longer next time!
