2026 abstracts

Imagine you're dropped into a game of capture the flag. You don't know the terrain, you don't know where the boundaries are, and you have no idea how the other team is playing. The whistle blows, and within minutes, you're lost, outmaneuvered, and not even sure where the flag is.

That's exactly how most people experience their first CTF.

Too many players think the goal is simple: find the flag, grab it, and win. When they can't, they assume they're not technical enough and step out of the game. But in reality, no one expects you to win your first round. You learn by exploring the field, getting caught, trying different paths, and slowly figuring out how the game works.

CTFs are supposed to feel this way. You're supposed to get stuck. You're supposed to feel like you don't know what you're doing. That's not failure, that's how you build the skills that actually matter.

This talk reframes what success in a CTF looks like. It's not about capturing the flag, it's about learning how to think. How do you approach a system you don't understand? What do you do when your first idea fails? How do you adapt, research, and keep moving without a clear path?

Drawing from experience building student teams and onboarding new players, this session breaks down how to engage with challenges you can't immediately solve, and still walk away with real progress. We'll cover practical strategies for breaking down problems, building technical intuition, and turning frustration into forward momentum.

Because in CTFs, just like in the game, you're not supposed to know how to walk in and grab the flag. You're supposed to learn the field first.

We keep producing cybersecurity graduates who can pass the cert but fall apart in the field, not because they can't hack, but because nobody taught them how to handle failure, work in a team, or grow without a syllabus telling them what to do next. DCG-SATX and NightHAX were created to fill that gap, and this talk is the story of what worked, what nearly broke me, and what I wish someone had told me on day one. If you're an educator, a mentor, or anyone trying to build the next generation of security professionals, this one's for you.

When I started DCG-SATX and expanded the NightHAX student community, I wasn't trying to build a program. I was trying to fill a gap that no degree plan or certification track seemed to care about: what happens to students after they learn the technical skills but before they're actually ready for the field?

The answer, I found, was usually failure. Not failure at hacking, failure at being part of a team, failure at recovering from a bad CTF performance, failure at the slow, unglamorous work of showing up consistently when no one is watching. Traditional cybersecurity education doesn't prepare students for any of that. Community does.

This talk is part personal story, part practical playbook. I'll walk through how DCG-SATX and NightHAX were built from nothing but an idea, struggling for institutional backing, little to no dedicated funding, and what we learned the hard way about student attrition, mentor burnout, and the quiet damage that "rockstar" cultures do to team cohesion. I won't skip the dark parts: there were moments I came close to walking away entirely.

But I'll also share what worked. Students who were weeks from quitting who stayed and eventually became mentors themselves. A model built on three things: structured community time, deliberate mentorship pairing, and a culture where it's genuinely safe to fail and try again.

Attendees will leave with a replicable framework for building student-driven cybersecurity ecosystems, and an honest picture of what it actually costs to sustain one.