Five George Mason cybersecurity students hack their way to Boston

The Country to Country (C2C) Capture the Flag (CTF) contest is an international competition that issues challenges to code, decrypt, search, hack, and reverse engineer their way through as many challenges as possible. 

About 500 students from nearly 100 countries, ranging from inexperienced freshmen to PhD candidates in cybersecurity, competed individually in the qualifying rounds. Only the top 100—including five from George Mason University—were accepted into the finals. Four went to Boston for the competition, held this year at Northeastern University.  

The College of Engineering and Computing students Gael Abboud, Sanjay Kumar Samala, Nhat Le, and Jonah Wilbur represented the green and gold, but were all placed on different teams. (Amaan Abbas also made the cut but could not attend.) 

“The organizers were amazing,” said Abboud, who is a graduate student pursuing her master's in systems engineering through the Accelerated Master's Program. She explained that they try to make it a truly international and cooperative competition. Ideally, each team would contain people from different countries.  

“Somehow, I ended up on a team with two other people from Virginia,” Abboud said with a laugh. “They came from Virginia Commonwealth University and William and Mary.” 

Her Virginia-strong team did the state proud. Over a day of competition, they sometimes worked together and sometimes apart to solve as many problems as possible from across various skill sets.  

It’s not just coding. Abboud described one of the challenges. “It was open-source intelligence, which is really just fancy Googling. They set a scene where we had to find a very certain scooter repair shop in Boston. They told us that it was near a metro stop and in sight of an Indian restaurant. Seems like it should be easy, but it wasn’t!” 

They also had to track down things like the price of the building and the vice president of the company that sold it more than 60 years ago. “No one solved that one.” 

In the end, Abboud’s team landed in fourth place: an admirable showing when the contestants represent some of the best from around the globe. “I was so disappointed,” she sighed. “There was less than one point separating us from the third-place team.” 

Abboud said that she loved every minute and would tell anyone curious about hack-a-thons to try qualifying for this Capture the Flag event. 

“It may seem intimidating, but there are challenges for any skill level,” she said. “You don’t know what it will be like if you don’t try.  Don’t stress if you don’t know something. People are happy to walk you through how they solved it.”