2025-09-05 –, Track 2
The Dutch WHY2025 hacker camp (held in August 2025) contained a lot of activities and entertainment for the attendees. This presentation focuses on two of these activities, namely the CTF (Capture The Flag) and Secret Token Game. These activities entertained a large amount of the visitors, including seasoned hackers, inspired newcomers and even the youngest generation. The goal of the activities was to entertain, learn and train the visitors, but also to inspire the next generation of hackers.
The presentation gives an overview of the different activities on the hacker camp with a deep-dive in to the CTF and Secret Token Game. It will show the concept of the activities, statistics, the type of challenges the visitors were tasked with, and how we organize all these activities. The presentation shows how gamification is used for learning, engaging interested visitors and attracting new talent.
The same team that organized these activities for WHY2025 has also done this on the previous hacker camps in 2022 (MCH), 2017 (SHA) and 2013 (OHM). The speaker has been the team lead of this team for all of these events.
Thijs Bosschert is a technically-strong and creative security professional focused on solving any incident or challenge he comes across. Thijs has been active in the security field since the early 2000s, and has a background in incident response, gamification, red/purple-teaming and penetration testing.
Thijs has been an active CTF player for many years with teams such as Eindbazen, Jobless Hackers, Hack.ERS and Spotless. With those teams he won multiple large CTFs including the Hack in the Box CTFs in Amsterdam. Thijs has been the lead organizer of the CTFs at OHM2013, SHA2017, MCH2022 and WHY2025. Thijs was also the head of the digital detective team at the headquarters of the second and third seasons of the Hunted TV show (2017 & 2018).