Creating An Exciting Learning Environment For Future Cybersecurity Experts At Battle Of Hackers (BOH) 2022

BOH is bringing back the real CTF after two years of virtual competition with a tougher challenge, and two of the top six winners are APU students

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After seven months of preparation, the Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation's (APU) Battle of Hackers (BOH) 2022 concluded with two APU teams named as the Top 6 winners out of 49 teams from 13 different Malaysian universities and polytechnic.

APU’s BOH is an annual Capture the Flag (CTF) cybersecurity competition open to all students from Malaysian universities and higher institutions. The aim of BOH is to provide a spotlight for talented youth and allow students from across the nation to test and enhance their knowledge and skills, particularly in cybersecurity and digital forensics.

Several criteria are used to evaluate the BOH, including relevance, technology used, scalability and limitations, and others. Using the APU global platform and accelerator programme, the BOH aims to accelerate all students’ knowledge with the next level disruptive Boot2Root Challenge, in which all participants must root the server to complete the challenge.

Furthermore, BOH 2022 includes a parallel session, a webinar by Amazon Web Services (AWS) on ‘Cybersecurity Challenges in Digital Landscape’ and a forum from sponsors on ‘Scam and How to Spot Scammers’ that takes place concurrently with the CTF competition.

Ms Nor Azlina Abdul Rahman and Ms Noris Ismail, APU Forensics and Cyber Security Research Center - Student Section (FSeC-SS) Advisors, explained that during the pandemic, BOH was unable to run the competition physically, but FSeC-SS successfully organised an online competition.

“For two years, FSeC-SS organised an online competition, and this year 2022, with the support of APU and sponsors AWS, EC-council, Standard Chartered, SecureKi, Firmus, and Across Verticals, we were back to physical competition,” both said.

The competition attracted a large number of participants, including diploma, undergrad, and postgraduate students from 13 Malaysian universities and polytechnics.

“Hopefully, BOH will come back next year with more categories and challenging questions for the competition. FSeC-SS hopes that next year we will be able to open participation to ASEAN universities and polytechnics.”

Learn new things and develop new skills

Team Spac3Cat's (William Wijaya, Nicholas and Ryan Martin) demonstrated their coding skills and were named 1st runner up for BOH 2022.

Team Spac3Cat’s Data Analytics and Cyber Security students Nicholas, Ryan Martin, and William Wijaya were named 1st runner up for this year BOH.

Although this group won BOH 2021, this year’s competition was very challenging and exciting because of the new Boot2Root challenge, in which all participating users run a virtual machine-based challenge with the goal of obtaining root permission on it in order to receive the flag.

“It is always important to learn new skills. Because there are a billion skills to learn in cybersecurity, it is important to practise learning new things. In this field, it’s not so much how good you are at coding as it is how good you are at learning,” said Nicholas, representing team Spac3Cat.

“The team will continue to improve on our solution to live up to our vision as well as winning the BOH 2023 challenges.”

Along with team Spac3Cat, team ComeToChill (Lim Yi Siang, Lok Shang Ru, and Lee Zhen Ting) finished 3rd runner up in this year's competition.

BOH 2022 was won by team A1ph4_Sh4rk from Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT) with 1,830 points, followed by team Spac3Cat from APU with 1,810 points, team Pengg0damn from Universiti Kuala Lumpur (UNIKL) with 1,770 points, team ComeToChill from APU with 1,700 points, and team roBL0x from UNIKL with 1,650 points.

Other universities and polytechnics participating in BOH 2022 include First City University College (FCUC), German-Malaysian Institute (GMI), International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Mersing Polytechnic, TATI University College (TATIUC), Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Tenaga Nasional University (UNITEN), Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia (UPNM), Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) and Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR).