A victory at the InfoGroep Cybersecurity Challenge.

The Challenge

The InfoGroep CTF 2026 is a beginner-friendly cybersecurity competition at the VUB, where teams of four compete to solve a variety of technical puzzles. The challenges ranged from classic web exploitation, reverse engineering, cryptography,… to hands-on physical security tasks, such as NFC tags and even lockpicking. Each successfully solved challenge earned the team points and a spot higher on the leaderboard.

Although I have several years of experience building my own infrastructure at NercLab (my homelab), this was my very first official CTF. Cybersecurity felt like the logical next step in my development as a computer science student, but I went there with the idea of learning as much as possible.

The Experience

What started as an educational evening ended in an exciting neck-and-neck race. To my great surprise (and pride!), our team managed to collect the most points in our category and we finished in first place 🏆.

This victory confirmed to me that the hours I spent in my home lab had laid a solid foundation for real-world security challenges.

NercLab Dashboard