UC cybersecurity club holds “capture the flag” hackathon

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Contestants gather in the 1819 Innovation Center for the 2026 BearcatCTF hackathon at the University of Cincinnati on Feb. 21, 2026.

Bhavya Pant | Contributor

Members of Cyber@UC club, a student cybersecurity club at the University of Cincinnati (UC), hosted a capture-the-flag (CTF) hackathon at the 1819 Innovation Hub on Feb. 21, 2026. Known as BearcatCTF, the annual event drew over 900 virtual and in-person competitors from around the Greater Cincinnati area.In a CTF-style competition, participants work to decode challenges and obtain hidden “flags” to score points and climb the leaderboard. The contest’s scoring system works inversely: the more often a challenge is solved, the less points it awards.“There’s different versions of it, but the most common that we run is called Jeopardy style,” said event organizer Andrew Margolin. “We have 44 distinct challenges where you’re looking to find a flag of some sort, expose that flag and then submit it for points.”BearcatCTF challenges are developed in-house by Cyberclub members and range from reverse engineering and cryptography to networking and web exploitation. “We also have more networking-based challenges,” said event organizer and first-year cybersecurity major Matthew Bryce. “These are technical in a sense, but it’s something anyone can understand and quickly get into. This is kind of for everyone.”While the competition calls for a high screentime, its organizers said they worked to design an experience that isn’t just sitting alone in front of a screen for 24 hours.“We encourage students to go talk to sponsors and to each other, building communication and networking skills alongside their technical ones,” Margolin said. The contest also included a number of third-party challenges submitted by company sponsors of BearcatCTF. The curated challenges offered participants the chance to engage with potential co-op and internship recruiters during the competition. Sponsors included HII Mission Technologies, Fifth Third Bank and the Greater Cincinnati Chapter of the Information System Security Association.Bryce says Cyber@UC started hosting CTF tournaments after a group of graduating club members “wanted to build something of their own.”BearcatCTF “has since expanded to a much larger scale,” Bryce said. “Not just from Cincinnati, but also across the nation and internationally as well.”According to Margolin, the club took a more direct approach towards CTF recruitment in 2026. Margolin says Cyber@UC members asked UC faculty members to grant extra credit to first-year students who competed. Margolin estimates around 25% of 2026 in-person attendees were first-years.Bryce said the competition was intended to provide practical experience in cybersecurity beyond what contestants learn in the classroom. He said outside research is not only allowed but expected and encouraged.“The majority of our problems, you’re not going to learn in your classrooms,” Bryce said. “You have to do your own research and then implement it. We’re happy to help people get started but we also want them to figure it out for themselves.” According to Margolin, interested students do not need extensive preparation or background knowledge in order to compete.“You don’t need anything beyond your beginner classes and basic Linux knowledge, and even if you don’t have that, you can still start,” Margolin said. “Whether you were doing system administration, networking or programming, [BearcatCTF is] just an added angle on top of that.”Of the 2026 competitors, only one team managed to clear every challenge put in front of them. The top scoring team in the in-person division was KobiWare from Northern Kentucky University, finishing with 4,520 points.According to Bryce, winning was never the only point. “For us, success is seeing the event grow, seeing people learn and bringing new people in,” he said. “Seeing what it’s about, finding out if there’s a certain area they enjoy and maybe opening their eyes a little.”