🏆🚩 Honoured to share our results from the HKIRC Cyber Attack and Defence Champion — Tertiary Group, and 🥈 1st Runner-up in the Professional Group.
This competition was especially memorable because it changed how I think about AI in CTFs. 🤖⚔️
AI was a powerful tool, but success was not about simply prompting: "Help me solve this challenge and give me the flag." 🚩
The real challenge was building an effective workflow under time pressure. ⏱️ I worked on automating parts of our investigation workflow so that we could reduce repetitive work and spend more time reading code or files, generating small helper scripts, and testing focused hypotheses. 🔎📜 Rather than asking an agent to solve everything end to end, we split the work into smaller tasks that could be checked and refined. 🧩
More prompts do not always mean faster progress. Too many agents can create duplicated work, noisy output, and more assumptions to verify. 🌪️ The key was balancing speed with control: deciding what to automate, what to investigate manually, and which path deserved the team's limited time. 🎯
One important habit was reviewing the agent logs, not just trusting the final response. 📜 By checking its commands, evidence, and assumptions, we could see when an agent was heading in the wrong direction — then refine the task, provide better context, or stop the path and pivot. 🧭
AI expanded our ability to explore, and turning that exploration into progress required keeping humans in the loop. 👨💻🤝🤖
Huge thanks to my teammate Wyli (Dhairya Shah) 🙌💙 for the teamwork and persistence throughout the competition.
And a special thank you to our Firebird CTF Team Instructor, Dr. Alex Lam 🙏🔥 for coming to support us at the award ceremony — your guidance has meant a lot throughout our CTF journey! 🏆🚩
Thank you as well to Digital Policy Office & HKIRC 🙏 for organizing such a meaningful platform for cybersecurity talent.