The Champion team (from left to right): Goh Kah Pooi, Wang Teng Zheng and Ong Sheng He with Prof Ir Ts Dr Vinesh A/L Thiruchelvam, Chief Innovation and Enterprise Officer of APU.
Wang Teng Zheng being named the ‘Most Valuable Player’ and also awarded for the Best Write-Up.
Consolation prize team winners.
TAR UMT students have done it once again! This time, the students hacked their way to emerge as Champions at the Battle of Hackers 2022 organised by Asia Pacific University (APU), a repeat of the Championship win achieved in 2019.
The team, which consists of Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons) in Information Security students, Ong Sheng He and Goh Kah Pooi, and Diploma in Information Technology student, Wang Teng Zheng, put their technical knowledge and quick thinking skills to ace all the challenges and claim the top prize. This time, they even took it one step further by claiming not just the Champion title, but also the Most Valuable Player (MVP), Best Write-Up and Consolation awards. The MVP title and Best Write-Up were garnered by Wang Teng Zheng and the Consolation prize winners were Choo Chi Siang, Bee Zheng Xian and Lee Yit Eng, all from the Bachelor of Information Technology (Hons) in Information Security programme.
Battle of Hackers 2022 features a gruelling six-hour Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge, which pitted 49 teams from 13 different institutions of higher learning in Malaysia against each other. The teams were subjected to a variety of problems related to cyber security, such as Cryptography, Forensics, Miscellaneous, Network, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), Pwn, Web Exploitation, Reverse Engineering, Steganography and Boot2Root. The team that obtains the highest points by solving the challenges will be considered the winner.
“We plan, we fight, we grow, that's how we work as a team. We planned our strategy, and assigned each member a professional category so each of us would have our own task to do. We completed each task efficiently without wasting any time even during breaks. We did not give up until the competition ended. We communicated as a team which is really the key. We talked, learned, and took advice from each other and that was how we won this game,” said Sheng He, who is the leader of the team.
Sheng He said that they could not have done it without the support of their lecturers and senior. “I would like to thank TAR UMT, the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology (FOCS), our Dean, Ts Lim Shen Huoy and also Ms Ashvini Devi a/p Krishnan, Advisor, for approving and providing us sponsorship to join this competition and giving us their full confidence,” he said.
He believes that he can still improve his technical skills. “I still lack experience because some tasks may require new technical skills which I do not have, but I am sure if I keep practising and keep competing in CTF competitions, it will make me a more skilled person,” he mentioned.
His advice to those who wish to follow in their footsteps. “Just like my name Miracle0604 in the CTF world, I have a mantra that I always hold on to, which is ‘Believe in your heart that you are meant to live a life of passion, purpose, magic and miracle’. Always stay humble, keep learning, be passionate, be a dream chaser and never give up. Remember failure is a chance to learn and grow; to gain insights from what does not go right and carry this knowledge forward to build future successes. What is scary is not failure but people who are afraid to try and accept failure and try again from the start. Failure is not the end but the beginning of a new challenge,” he said.
