DSU team wins Wild West Hackin’ Fest CTF competition
October 30, 2025
Two Dakota State University students and two alumni earned first place competing in the two-day Wild West Hackin’ Fest (WWHF) Capture the Flag (CTF) competition in Deadwood earlier this month.
The CTF team included: current students Derek Manzella and Rayn Light, and recent graduates Ryan Kleffman and Hunter Wade. The CTF team and two other individuals, Merrill Newman and Gwen Vongkasemsiri, received free tickets for winning the global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) in January 2025 from one of the sponsors, Black Hills Information Security.
“We heard that they were doing a CTF competition over the course of the conference, and then figured we would try to go for it,” said Wade.
The WWHF CTF competition run by MetaCTF required participants to complete various cybersecurity challenges involving forensics, binary exploitation, cryptography, web exploitation, reverse engineering, and more.
“We were able to solve the entire first set of challenges by midnight,” Wade said.
That put them in the lead, and after the second day of competition, the first-and second-place teams were tied, with the DSU team taking first place for reaching the tie score first.
“I think we beat them by an hour and a half,” Kleffman said.
One of the reasons Kleffman chose to attend DSU was all of the competitions and wins DSU students and faculty participate in. “It feels nice to be in the history of wins,” he said.
While the team isn’t new to winning, this CTF had them competing against industry professionals from companies like Tenable.
By winning the competition, the team earned a coveted black badge that grants lifetime free admission to future WWHF conferences. And while the black badge certainly was an incentive to do well, the team most appreciated the support and congratulations from DSU faculty.
“We got to see Tyler Flaagan smile for like the third time ever,” Kleffman laughed.
Noah Krull, a penetration tester in Research & Economic Development at DSU, was excited to learn about the team’s win.
“Once I saw the team, Rayn told me about the team they formed, I had little to no doubt that they were going to knock it out of the park,” Krull said.