ACM@UIUC

Incoming message from Mission Control: Registration for HackIllinois 2026 is NOW OPEN! Ready for a stellar time? Apply by 1/4 for priority registration (and a chance to win an iPad!) with final registration on 1/27. 🚀 Register now at https://hackillinois.org/

i "threw" the best birthday party i have ever had. not joking. . . . on sept 21, SIGPwny (the ACM@UIUC special interest group for cybersecurity) held their annual fallctf competition. it was also my birthday. thus, i proclaimed (roughly paraphrased) > @everyone, come to my birthday party on sept 21 at CIF 3039/3031 for FallCTF.      to be honest, even though i'm a linux addict, i dont have much ctf experience past attending two sigpwny meetings last year and solving a binary exploit challenge (where Raymond Yang explained how to solve netcat type CTFs). however, equipped with nothing but the terminal, Sriya Gottiparthi, and the large language model, we were confident. so confident in fact, that we entered the advanced division instead of the beginner division despite our eligibility for the latter. throughout the six hours of the competition, we battled for top spots, sitting among the top 5 spots for most of the competition. we solved challenges ranging from web hacking (a lot of inspect element) to osint (open source intelligence), pwn (binary exploitation), and rev (reverse engineering) and more. we were even the first to solve a challenge where we had to exploit the firmware running on the PCB badge we were given as attendees. some of these, i had to figure out as i went on (i installed both ghidra (the reverse engineering engine) and pwntools (a python library with common tools to assist with solving CTFs) midway through the competition for the first time). however as time went on, we found ourselves slipping. people caught up to us as our early initial lead diminished. we even fell as far as 11th. however, in the end, due to a few solves in the last 10 minutes on some flags, we fought back up to 6th out of 37 teams in our track and 9th overall out of all 131 teams. this was one place away from being eligible to receive prizes such as mechanical keyboards or yubikeys. the difference between us and 5th place was 8 points. for reference, flags were around 500 points (although some reduced in value as the competition went on). however, we ended up learning a lot about ctf challenges, and even got this cool PCB badge to show off! during this year, i intend to keep competing with sigpwny on the embedded team where we compete in MITRE's embedded CTF and write a lot of blazing-fast 🚀 rust 🦀 and exploit a lot of other teams' c. thanks to who came to my birthday party, including but not limited to 1. everyone i mentioned above 2. Aiden Ye, Yotam Dubiner, Kush Bhardwaj, Vinay Rajagopalan, Ari Zukerman, Quinten Schafer, Mihir Tandon 3. everyone else who competed. 4. a special thanks to sriya, my teammate. Without her, i'd have solved maybe half of the challenges. 5. the reps from Battelle, REDLattice, Inc., and John Deere who sponsred the event. 6. sigpwny admins and helpers, the contest was amazing. 7. acm @ uiuc and their exec board for being, by far, the best forum on the entire campus of uiuc for cs events across the board.