"Catching the Catfish: How University Students Won a National Cybersecurity Contest"
A team of four undergraduate students from the University of Nevada, Reno, who competed in the 2023 Summer Social Engineering Event hosted by Temple University, found success by scamming an Internet scammer. The team named "WolfHack@UNR" won the three-day online competition aimed at bringing further attention to the relevance of social engineering in cybersecurity. This year's social engineering competition focused on romance scams or "catfishing," the practice of luring someone into a relationship by creating a fake online persona. Catfishing is not a technical computer problem or vulnerability that a cybersecurity student would typically encounter, but it is a significant problem. According to data from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cited on the competition website, nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam in 2022, and losses reached $1.3 billion. Since these schemes rely on manipulation and deception, a competition to identify and prove catfishing differs slightly from the typical cybersecurity contest that tests technical expertise. One of the winning team members noted that it was not a typical cybersecurity competition and was almost psychological. This article continues to discuss the national cybersecurity contest and how the WolfHack@UNR team won it.