Welcome!

We're glad to see that you're interested in competing with us as part of the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC)! At its heart, CPTC is a bit different from several other collegiate Cybersecurity competitions. Instead of defending your network, searching for flags, or claiming ownership of systems, CPTC focuses on mimicking the activities performed during a real-world penetration testing engagement conducted by companies, professional services firms, and internal security departments around the world.

Each year our volunteers and sponsors develop an immersive mock organization which is seeking penetration testing services. Competitors play the role of a consulting firm that is providing this service to our organization. Each team will be provided with a completely identical but separate and segmented environment to perform their testing. Just as with a real-world pen-test, you will be asked to provide deliverables, presentations to company management, and recommendations on vulnerabilities discovered during your test.

Teams will be scored not just on the technical vulnerabilities discovered, but also on their professionalism and communication skills. We will have members of the company IT team and management on-hand during the competition to answer any questions that you may have or issues that may arise during your testing of the company’s network.

Sept 1st 2023
RFP is Live

January 11th-14th 2024
Global Finals

While these don’t change much year to year, we do make revisions between each competition season to keep the rules current based on our experiences! Still have questions? Please contact us!