📅 Date: 17-20 March 2025
📍 Location: Online
🎮 Type: Active Event – Capture the Flag (CTF) – Student Edition
Earlier this month, I had the chance to take part in the Hackfinity Battle CTF, a student-exclusive challenge hosted on Hack The Box. The event gathered over 27,000 participants and 4,356 teams in an intense, time-boxed hacking marathon spanning 1,000 minutes.
Competing as part of Team EATM, alongside three fellow trainees from EATM-CERT, we took on this Jeopardy-style CTF and gave it everything we had—from binary exploitation to web hacking, cryptography, forensics, and beyond.
🏆 Our Performance
With a total of 65 tasks, the Hackfinity Battle room was both broad and deep.
Team Highlights:
- ✅ 45/65 tasks completed
- 🔢 Final Rank: #295 out of 4356
- 💬 Challenges included classic reverse engineering, packet analysis, obscure crypto, steganography, and logic puzzles
Team Members:
- nzOw
- sell (me)
- Kebza
💡 Lessons from the Field
- 🔄 Task distribution is key – Clear division of work meant minimal overlap and maximum efficiency
- 🧠 Don’t underestimate the basics – Some “easy” tasks required precise execution to avoid wasting time
- 🧩 Multi-layered challenges – A number of tasks had hidden twists, requiring lateral thinking and deep focus
- 🤝 Communication makes or breaks a team – Quick updates, notes, and shared shells kept us synced
🎯 Reflections
Hackfinity Battle was more than just a fun exercise—it was a real test of how we work under pressure, think critically, and collaborate on complex problems. As part of our learning journey at EATM-CERT, this kind of experience is invaluable in preparing us for real-world threat detection and analysis.
We walked away from the event with new skills, tighter teamwork, and a big morale boost. On to the next CTF!
