JerseyCTF 2025 Was (A Lot) More Than Fun and Games
The NJIT JerseyCTF competition is now in its fifth year and has continued to draw competitors on-campus and around the world in a quest to hack their way through a series of information security style puzzles to “capture the flag” and win an impressive array of prizes — along with bragging rights as placeholders among what has become a global phenomenon in CTF competitions.
The annual event, a collaboration between NJIT’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) chapter and the NJIT Information and Cybersecurity Club (NICC), culminated in a record 154 on-campus players this year. The March 24-hour marathon weekend, for which planning begins in the fall semester, saw a total of 1,314 registrants, including 1,160 remote participants from around the world.
The competition integrates the excitement of gaming with valuable experiential learning, as each team is called upon to put knowledge and training into practice, from problem solving, critical thinking and analysis, to enhancing leadership skills and working under deadlines.
The term "full stack developer" takes on new meaning as a learning experience for the planning committee as well, which this year included Ian Hanna, Trent Gwathney, Noah Jacobson, Robert Blacha, Abdullah Imran, Alfed Simpson and Benjamin Topolosky. Between October and March, the group must manage challenge developers comprised of fellow students, alumni and faculty; engage with potential corporate sponsors; secure special guests from different areas of industry, including the FBI; coordinate logistics such as space, food, social activities and decorating based on the year’s theme; and manning “command central,” where members sitting at terminals field myriad help tickets on everything from puzzle guidance and technical glitches, to questioning certain challenges.
Surveys given out at the end of the weekend allow participants to rate the entire event on a scale of 1-5, with the latter being a perfect score. This year, JerseyCTF earned a score of 4.0 for educational value, and an overall score of 4.14. According to Hanna, “the reviews overall were both positive and supportive, while giving us a direction to improve going forward.”
Michael Geraghty, director of New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell (NJCCIC) and principal sponsor, commended the students for having grown exponentially and become highly advanced in every respect.
“The first year was like putting it all together with bubble gum and duct tape,” he said. “These young people have matured at such an astounding level. The whole thing is student run now. I have loved being part of their journey."
As the popularity of JerseyCTF continues to grow, so has the interest in attending the event in person. This year, four students from the University of Puerto Rico decided to fly to Newark just be “in the room where it happens.” Their computer science department even recognized the learning opportunity enough to fund the entire trip.
Francisco Melendez observed, “I didn’t think it would be this hard! The puzzles were really challenging!” His friend, Yadriel Camys, added, “But they were well done challenges, and we loved the cool theme.”
As the website now states: “The competition has concluded. Stay tuned for JerseyCTF VI in spring 2026!”
Thank you to this year’s sponsors: NJCCIC, ADP, ISACA, Blackwood, Splunk, TekStream, AWS, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, SCI and GitHub.
The Winners
Open Division (includes professionals):
1 - InfoSec IITR (a school in India)
2 – BITSkrieg (a school in India)
3 – ZeroNine (a Vietnamese team)
Student Division:
1 – KCSC (Vietnam) – Academy of Cryptography Techniques
2- Students Taking Flags United (Hong Kong) – The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
3- NYUSEC - New York University
Top countries participating: U.S. (32 states), India, Vietnam, Canada, Indonesia, Morocco, Australia, Russia, France, and Hong Kong.