A team of 10 graduate cybersecurity students from New York Tech’s Vancouver campus earned the 25th spot in MITRE’s 2025 Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) competition. In their first-ever appearance at the event, the team ranked in the top tier among nearly 140 teams from universities and schools around the world.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the eCTF, which attracted more than 1,200 students representing 123 institutions from 17 countries. The three-month competition took place in two phases. In the design phase, teams design and implement a secure embedded system. In the attack phase, they attempt to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in systems developed by other teams.

For this competition, the teams were tasked with designing and implementing a satellite TV system solution. The system needed to encode and decode satellite TV data streams securely while protecting against unauthorized access to protected channels.