SherpaCTF 2025 Appreciation Post

date

Nov 24, 2025

slug

sherpactf25

author

status

Public

category

💬 Blog

updatedAt

Nov 29, 2025 09:04 AM

1 Day, 0 Internet, All skill.

Who else noticed I kinda disappeared from posting for a few months? Well the thing that kept me busy was SherpaSec’s SherpaCTF 2025, and it finally happened on 24 Nov in conjunction with the Parallel Pulse Conference by NanoSec.Asia 🥳

First off, huge congratulations to all the players. You all did insanely well solving everything without your usual best friends: Internet and AI. It already takes huge courage just to tackle a CTF with this concept, and SOLO? Yall have my respect fr 🫡

At SherpaSec, we’ve always liked doing things a little differently. For context, most of our crew have organised or helped run traditional Jeopardy-style CTFs before (IBOH, wgmy, etc), so this year we wanted to try something new. That’s how SherpaCTF: Offline Mode was born (Credits to Yik Han Wong for cooking the idea👨🏻‍🍳)

No internet.

No Wi-Fi.

No AI.

Just pure, back-to-basics, RTFM skills. And it worked!

Huge thank you to our sponsors Division Zero (Div0), The Hacking Group, Signalens, Casaba Security, Altered Security, VERDESEC, NanoSec.Asia and Belinda Choong for trusting us with this “uncommon” CTF concept!

We had 2 side quests, speed gaming and speed lockpicking!

But here’s the part the public didn’t see.

The CTF was planned months ahead. Everything was neat on paper (Discord) until three weeks before the event when everything basically fell apart :'D

Venue changed.

Gameplay had to change.

Rules changed.

Marketing and PR had to change their strategy.

Technical team had to adjust to the gameplay changes.

We jumped from Plan A straight to Plan E. It was chaotic, but the team pushed through 💪🏻

As the project manager, November nearly cooked me alive. Week 1 thinking everything was on schedule for SherpaCTF, Week 2 running ICC, Week 3 at Code Blue, then flying back to juggle SherpaCTF plus 6–7 other Sherpasec projects at the same time. It was brutal, but the team carried the whole thing with zero complaints.

And here’s the part I’m most proud of:

Every single crew member was a volunteer. People took annual leave just to make this event happen.

That’s the level of heart this team has 🩵

The photo I attached isn’t even the full team, but I want all of them to know this:

SherpaCTF wouldn’t exist without you.

It wouldn’t have worked without you.

And it definitely wouldn’t have succeeded without you.

This post is for the SherpaSec crew, the people who made the impossible somehow happen.

You think that’s all? SherpaSec still have things planned for the year and the next, and next year’s chaos will be even bigger 😉🔥 Anyways, since it's almost December, maybe I should post what I haven’t before the year comes to an end HAHAHA