Flags, caffeine, and a championship certificate
Before booking funnels and Stripe webhooks, I was a CS student who spent free hours poking at broken systems on purpose. In August 2023, that habit paid off.
Building Cyber Champions in Lingayen
Our team—Zer0day—walked into the regional qualifying round of Hack4Gov: Capture the Flag, organized by the DICT and CERT-PH at the Golden Lion Hotel in Lingayen. The theme was "Building Cyber Champions." Four of us (me, Harold Moyano, Liv Torres, and Christian Earl De Guzman) competed under mentors Carl Gustaf Patrik Ferrer and Alexandre Espinosa.
What a CTF day actually feels like
CTF days don't feel glamorous. You're staring at crypto puzzles, digging through disk images, hunting web vulns, and trying not to burn the clock on a Windows box that refuses to cooperate. Every "flag" is a small proof you understood the fault—and every point on the board is someone else solving the same thing faster. We finished with 1,929 points and took Champion among seven Region I teams, earning a slot to represent the region in the Manila finals.
What stayed with me
What stuck with me wasn't only the certificate. It was learning to stay calm when the problem looks unfair, divide work without ego, and treat security as something you practice under pressure—not a buzzword on a syllabus. That mindset still shows up when I debug a payment webhook at midnight or tighten a form that handles real guest data.
Official coverage
PSU covered the win in full—if you want the official write-up, it's here: 'Zer0day' Clinches Championship in 2023 Reg'l Hack4Gov Competition.