We are the BTU Cyber Security Club - also called BTU CTF Club for short, due to our participation in Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions. We are a group of BTU students, alumni and interested people looking to expand their knowledge in all fields of cyber security. While studies at BTU already provide great theoretical and practical foundations, we found that there is a lot more you can do in cyber security than can be taught in lectures: Be it designing our own secure systems and figuring out how to break into them, hacking our way through our computer science building or simply participating in CTFs as a team. Thus, we founded this club in May of 2023 so that we can teach each other new skills, experiment with new attacks and keep up with cyber security news together. Sometimes, we even manage to organize professional talks to gain an in-depth view into the state of the art.

While coding proves essential for many hacking tasks, really everybody is welcome to join us in the club. After all, cyber security is not just about hacking networks or reverse engineering computer programs: You might apply electrical engineering principles to attack the hardware a system is running on, or you may have to dive deep into mathematics to crack a cryptographic algorithm. And even beyond digital systems, there are ways to breach or deanonymize a target simply by combining openly accessible information (OSINT) or using techniques of traditional forensics. If you are interested in the club, we invite you to join our Discord and stop by one of our meetings!

Over the years, we have remained a small and tight-knit community. Even so, there are quite a few upcoming projects on our list. Maybe you would like to help and make your own mark on the club? Some of our current project ideas are:

• Expanding our infrastructure: Extending our Discord bot, building an automatic deployment plugin for CTFd, creating and hosting a more polished and integrated website, building our knowledge base for CTFs, …
• Trying our Flipper Zero against a variety of targets
• Practically investigating the risks of WiFi Pineapples in professional networks
• Building and playing our own Attack & Defense CTF to learn both sides of the art in a practical manner

Are there projects you would like to participate in or do you have an interesting project idea yourself? In either case, we are happy to hear your thoughts through Discord or in the meetings!

Our club communicates and organizes itself mainly through Discord. Our meetings are held roughly on a weekly basis - every Friday evening, usually at 19:00 o'clock. Most of our meetings are done online, with occasional on-site gatherings for CTF nights or special sessions. We keep ourselves flexible with the specifics - so do jump into the Discord and watch the General and Announcements channels if you want to know what is coming up!

If you want to participate or simply want to have a look at what we do, you are very welcome to join us here: https://discord.gg/WA77mqCczd. Please note that we require you to introduce yourself before you become a member and gain access to the major channels of the club, so that we can remain an active and bot-free community :)

For official inquiries, we are also reachable via email at cybersecurity-club(at)b-tu.de.