HSE Students Show Outstanding Results at Prestigious CTF Competitions
In late October 2025, HSE University students achieved outstanding results in several Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions on information security. Five students joined the Moscow national team, which won the Russian Sports Programming Championship, while three other HSE teams became finalists and winners of the UralCUP CTF and the Kuban CTF tournaments. The CTF Academy, an initiative that brings together students and teachers, has served as a central hub for building HSE's CTF community.
Russian Championship
On November 1, Orenburg hosted the Russian Sports Programming Championship, organised by the Russian Sports Programming Federation, the Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation, and the Government of the Orenburg Region.
The Moscow national team, which included five HSE students, took first place in the ‘Programming Information Security Systems’ category. The HSE team members are Mikhail Ilyin (captain) and Alexander Vedenyapin, both first-year students of the MIEM Information Security Bachelor’s programme, Mikhail Solovyov, master's student of the Master's Programme 'Information Security and Artificial Intelligence Technologies', Yaroslav Kikel, first-year student of the MIEM Cyber Security Bachelor’s Programme, and Maxim Kuznetsov, student of the Software Engineering Bachelor’s Programme of the Faculty of Computer Science. Another team member, Dmitry Loginov, represents MEPhI. The competition was held in a CTF format.
CTF (Capture the Flag) is an information security competition featuring tasks in cryptography, steganography, hacking, and other key data protection areas. Participation helps students acquire practical cybersecurity experience, learn teamwork, and prepare for careers in InfoSec. Many CTF participants go on to become bug bounty researchers, SOC analysts, pen-testers, security engineers, and company founders.
CTF competitions are typically held in one of two formats.
Attack-defence: teams receive access to servers with a set of identical vulnerabilities. The goal is to attack the opponent's service in real time while defending one's own. A successful attack captures the opponent’s flag.
Task-based: teams receive a set of tasks of varying difficulty and determine the order in which they will solve them. The more complex the task, the more points it is worth.
Participants aged 16 and over were eligible to take part in the task-based championship. HSE students joined the first Moscow national team for sports programming in information security systems.
‘Our sport is officially very young,’ says Mikhail Ilyin. ‘The Moscow national team included participants who won the 2024 Championship of the Russian Federation (a competition for 14–18 year-olds. —Editor’s note) and the 2025 Adult Cup of Russia. In addition, as HSE students, we won the Go CTF Tatarstan 2025 open information security tournament in September. To compete in the official national championship, we had to go through all required formalities for sports competitions: anti-doping procedures, medical certificates, and the qualifying round—the federal district championship, where we also took first place.’
Following the competition, all HSE students were awarded the titles of Master and Candidate Master of Sports in Programming.
Ural Cup and Kuban CTF
CTF teams from HSE University also claimed victory in two other major competitions. The VDNKh team won the UralCUP CTF, held at the University of Tyumen. The Ural Cup was conducted in the highly popular attack-defence format, a favourite among participants. More than 250 student and school teams took part in the qualifying round.
The teams UlitsaNineteenOFiveGoda and Moscow Does not Believe in Words placed second and fifth, respectively, in the finals of the major Kuban CTF tournament, held at Sirius as part of the Kuban CSC conference. Over 500 teams participated in the cup preliminaries, which used a task-based format.
Nikolay Kusmaul, student of the MIEM Information Security programme and member of two winning teams, shared his impressions of the Tyumen competitions: ‘The final round turned out to be quite comfortable for our team; the services and vulnerabilities were interesting. The day before the finals, we attended lectures by information security specialists at the University of Tyumen. Throughout the competition, we maintained our first-place rating among nine teams, outperforming teams from the Central University and Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.’
All HSE teams included mainly first- and second-year students who became interested in CTF during their school years and were finalists and winners of the All-Russian Olympiad in information security. Many participants began teaming up even before enrolling at HSE.
CTF Academy
At the beginning of the current academic year, the CTF Academy was established at HSE University on the basis of MIEM, bringing together students interested in cybersecurity competitions. The Academy's workshops combine classical academic classes with training in competitive CTF formats. Students with significant competition experience act as coaches and teachers.
Mikhail Ilyin is one of the CTF Academy's founders. ‘Our classes train students to solve real tasks,’ he said. ‘Most of them can be found at major CTF competitions: web vulnerabilities and penetration testing, cryptography, steganography and forensics, reverse engineering and binary exploitation, open-source intelligence, and infrastructure tasks. It’s encouraging to see the students engaged in the process.’
‘CTF competitions are an important part of a student’s practical training in information security,’ says Fedor Ivanov, Academic Supervisor of the MIEM Information Security programme. ‘You can’t have a full-fledged education in this field without practice, modelling real-world circumstances for specialists and developing skills to promptly respond to challenges, including completely new and unexpected ones. Lots of wonderful first-year students who are Olympiad winners have enrolled in our programme. They arrive with valuable experience and knowledge, and they are ready to share it. I have no doubt that CTF has a promising future at HSE University.’
‘CTF competitions are an important element of training young cybersecurity specialists,’ said Anton Sergeev, Academic Supervisor of the Master’s Programme in Information Security in the Financial Sector. ‘Participation not only helps students acquire new knowledge and skills but also builds sustainable motivation: to be a valuable team player, solve interesting and modern tasks, absorb new industry developments, and, of course, to win together with teammates and friends.’
HSE students are now preparing for new Russian and international competitions. ‘The past tournaments were a training session,’ says Arseny Porkhunov, captain of the VDNKh and UlitsaNineteenOFiveGoda teams and a second-year student at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science.
‘We wanted to train as a team to participate in more prestigious competitions, such as the CTF Cup of Russia, which we plan to win this year. We performed better than expected and look forward to future victories.’
In November 2025, several CTF Academy participants will travel to Power of Community, a major international competition in Seoul, for which five HSE students have already qualified.
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