SOCORRO, N.M. – A team of New Mexico Tech students took first place in a national Capture The Flag Competition hosted by KernelCon.

Luke Reynolds, Shad Gudmunson, Spencer Merrill, Owen Parkins and Bryan Hatton joined forces as the Cyber Janitorial Security Services team.

“This is a big deal,” Parkins said. “This is one of the newer conferences, but a lot of big names go there.”

(From left are Bryan Hatton, Luke Reynolds, Shad Gudmunson, Spencer Merrill (the ghost), and Owen Parkins.) 

The competition was March 27 and 28, with teams from across the country joining the competition. The event involved a series of cyber security challenges, each involving finding a key piece – or capture the flag – to earn points.

Parkins said the team got very little sleep over the two-day event. Due to social distancing, the Cyber Janitorial team interacted via Zoom as they proceeded through the challenges. Parkins said the challenges included combing through files, hacking a machine, and other computer science tasks. With each round, the challenges became more difficult.

With one hour to go, the NMT team was in second place, but more than 1,200 points behind the leaders. In that final hour, the Cyber Janitors completed three tasks and earned enough points to take the lead and win the event by 100 points with 5,075 total.

With the victory, the team members earned "Eternal Kernel" badges, which grants them free entry into Kernelcon and other similar conventions for life (https://kernelcon.org/about#reciprocity).

Everyone who participated also got an invite to participate on Hatton’s and Parkins’ DefCON qualification team.

“Everyone performed amazingly and really put in the work to make the victory a reality,” Parkins said. “I'm really proud of the team and hope to keep doing CTFs with them. Because of our performance at Kernelcon and the people on the team, I truly think we have a good shot at participating at DefCON this year.”

-- NMT --