Cyber Security Challenge Belgium 2025

This was my 5th and final year attending the “Cyber Security Challenge”. I enjoyed every year of it.

Sadly enough, this year I had none of my friends to attend the challenge with so I teamed up with a few students from Brussels to make the team “Bro idk”. Communication was quite rocky because only one of the members spoke English. That really didn’t bother me though, it’s nice to try some things in a new environment so I was up to the challenge.

Every year I go in blind to test how much I’ve improved. Recently we’ve been reverse-engineering malware and creating a mobile app, so I hoped that that might come in handy for some mobile or reverse challenges.

I was correct, kinda. We made a Discord group to solve the easiest challenges right off the bat and share some info regarding the harder ones. But we slowly realized that the difficulty scaled exponentially. Soon we were all focusing on 1 or 2 specific challenges, just trying to find something.

Looking back, I realized that we had quite bad time management because there were only 2 simultaneous people doing the challenges instead of 3, one was always away or sleeping.

CTFs with gigantic difficulty gaps are draining, on the first day we started full with enthusiasm, then the second day came and we all were just staring mindlessly at the seemingly impossible challenges. Meanwhile, I was just going down a rabbit hole of steganography and XOR-ing images without getting anywhere.

And finally the end came, we completed 34/58 challenges, placing us 49th out of the 357 teams. That’s not really something to brag about but I’m a bit impressed that we were able to get this with little contact and only being able to communicate digitally.

If you’re ever thinking of trying a CTF, definitely do it! The things you encounter are always fascinating.