Cyphercon 2025

For the first time in Cyphercon's history, Uw-Eau Claire has won the con!

This year was the first year that we had a dedicated cybersecurity club on campus and we won the entire conference, beating out 186 teams of industry professionals and other schools.

The Con

Cyphercon is Wisconsin's largest security conference, attended by thousands from across the midwest. There are talks, presentations, and challenges for almost every niche of cybersecurity, including network security, OSINT, cryptography, hardware hacking, lock picking and safe cracking, ISP hacking, game hacking, AI hacking, vintage computing, aerospace hacking, and more. Every year there is a Capture The Con competition where anyone can sign up to complete security challenges from around the conference to get points, seeing which team can complete the most challenges and get the most points.

The Team

Our club sent 5 students and our advisor, the CIO of UWEC.

The Challenges

We completed a number of challenges in all of the villages (now called wards) ((see above for a list)). There were two which stood out and were key to our success.

Find The Fox

Find The Fox is a physical challenge where a conference staff member turns on a personal wifi hotspot which they carry in a backpack or a pocket with a name that is known to the hunters. The hunters (us) have to systematically track the target (normally in a crowded room) using tools like WiGLE to identify the target based off of network strengths.

The generally accepted technique for the hunters is to work as a team, grouping in a circle and slowly closing the circle as they get a sense of where the target is in the circle based off of the hunters' detected network strengths.

We practiced it once before the conference in our own student center, and we will likely run it more in future years because it was fun and is one of the few cyber activities we can do while being up and moving.

Badge Scanning

Every year the toymakers (conference organizers) engineer some way to encourage conference goers to interact with each other, usually by making the badges (conference tickets) interactive with other badges. This year they added a challenge which gave your three points for every unique badge you scan (each badge had a nfc tag) with your phone. Compared to the other challenges which scored 50, 100, 150, 200 points it's not much, but they add up quickly.

In total we scanned 411 badges, we just stationed ourselves at points at the conference center where there was a lot of foot traffic and politely asked to scan everyone's badges. Most people were super cool and helpful, there were probably less than 10 total who refused to let us scan their badges.

During the casino party Thursday night there were a lot of people in the mock casino (which was awesome), we were doing our thing, scanning badges where we met the second place team. We introduced ourselves, bonded a little, and one of their members suggested working together to scan more badges. He pulled out two high visibility vests, so he and one of our member went around, scanning badges as "badge QA" (shoutout Dimethyl). Lots of fun.

The Conclusion

This was the first time to cyphercon as a club, and we ended up winning for the first time in UWEC history. We worked really hard, and winning felt really rewarding. It was a lot of fun. As a team we all learned a lot and were able to meet a lot of cool people. We will never forget the many cat ears and rounds of Quake.