NU CTF Club · Nov 2025 · Boston
Meltdown is a tri-annual CTF run by Northeastern’s CTF club. Placed 4th out of 30+ teams with a team of 3, contributing 70% of the total points scored.
Highlights
Led solves across web exploitation, binary exploitation, and cryptography. Most of the interesting problems involved chaining multiple vulnerabilities — finding an injection point wasn’t enough, you had to pivot from there.
One challenge that stood out involved bypassing a WAF through Unicode normalization to reach an SSTI sink. Another was a ret2libc chain where ASLR had to be defeated via a format string leak before the actual exploit.
Takeaways
CTFs are the fastest way to learn offensive security thinking. The time pressure forces you to build intuition rather than just methodology.
