Yes, I did my first talk, in front of dozens of people. It was on reverse engineering. It was for VuwCTF the Cyber Security Club at VUW.

The presentation#

The topic was more of an introductory one. I taught about history of reverse engineering, types of reverse engineering, what it is and why people do it, binary files, decompilers, disassemblers, debuggers, xor, etc. I also did a walk through of our first challenge, which as I am writing this after our second meetup, I am thinking that we should have done this for that event as well, as it was a much more difficult topic called AD(Active Directory).

What I learned about myself#

During my speech I used too many filler words such as uhh. It would have been much better if I stayed silent when I was not sure what to say. I get that this is a basic skill, and I knew this was the case, but I didn’t realise it was this bad. I will link the presentation below so you know what I mean.

I also learned that I can properly teach if I prepare well in advance, as I do believe I did get some interesting content out to the students.

The Lab#

The lab was successful, we had enough volunteers for the number of people actually participating in the labs. I really do think we got quite a few people interested into Reverse Engineering through this.
One thing I’m happy about is that a few high schoolers came and learned about REV(In my opinion the best CTF Category(OO~~ an opinion~. Someones going to get mad at me.)). Nobody made it to the last challenge but someone got very close.

What I learned from this#

We may need more people in future events. We had all our committee members and it was hard to get around to everyone to help… I hope this doesn’t become an issue in our next event(forshadowing).