HackFax x PatriotHacks CTF 2026

151 Capture The Flag (CTF) Challenges Deployed ✅ (more than the last two years combined)

133 Devposts submitted 😁

800+ Participants from 30+ different colleges 🤩

$50,000 secured funding 🤑

27 Workshops 👏

15 GMU Organization Partners ❤️

15 Company Sponsors 🤯

These are just some of of the results of Syed's hard work organizing THE BIGGEST IN-PERSON TECH EVENT IN GMU HISTORY. As VP of CS Club and Lead CTF Coordinator of HackFax x PatriotHacks, he was involved in all aspects of this 72-hour event, including, but not limited to:

1. Leading a 50-person team to design, test, and deploy CTF challenges from scratch, spanning 10 categories from Web Attacks to Cryptography to OSINT

2. Creating social media content, such as reels, which gained a total of around 400,000 views

3. Securing sponsors and their support, such as Desi Breakfast Club providing 400 FREE breakfast & lunch meals

4. Coordinating with diverse GMU organizations to have things like the FIRST FREE Henna Stand with Punjabis at Mason/GMU's Pakistani Student Association and Break Dance workshops with BreakFamous

5. Planning event logistics such as check-in, room bookings, and event schedule 

Look below at a CTF Demo video

HackFax CTF 2025

100+challenges created 💯

100+challenges tested 🎉

96 challenges deployed 🏆

200+ HackFax registrants 👀

This was the product of months of hard work as Lead HackFax CTF Coordinator with the CTF Development team. Building on last year's experience, several changes were implemented to enhance the quality of the Capture The Flag, including the use of regular expressions, the integration of team functionality, and a Marvel Superhero theme. There were challenges from typical categories, such as OSINT, and new ones, including Cloud. In all, there were 9 different categories. The mission was to mainstream CTFs, making them more accessible to people who aren't even in Cybersecurity. For the first time at Mason, a CTF and a Hackathon were combined into one event with people who had never done a CTF before developing and competing!

He also had the honor of helping market the event on social media via innovative reels which garnered 3k+ views and securing sponsors such as Oracle and Oracle Cloud, leading to HackFax for the first time being a cloud-powered event. 

Look below at a CTF Demo video

 Ukraine Power Grid Cyber Attack Research 

Conducted thorough research on the 2015 Ukraine Power Grid Attack. The inner workings of all the exploits were studied, including BlackEnergy 3 malware, KillDisk Malware, and TDoS attacks. Furthermore, Syed researched the attack in terms of the CIA triad. Finally, Syed learned about the Protection Framework used to protect the infrastructure at the time and what was recommended to enhance it. From all this, he came up with his own mitigation techniques for the attack.

GMU Honors Research Proposal 

As part of the GMU Honors program, Syed conducted PhD-level research on the Modern US-Pakistan relationship in terms of foreign direct investment (FDI) using scholarly databases to first further understand the history of Pakistan itself. Then, conducted a literature review on certain sources known as sources of consequence to better understand research relating to the topic. The review showed there was a lack of focused research on FDI for Pakistan. As a result, Syed proposed methods to answer the question: Has the modern Pakistan-US relationship been economically beneficial for Pakistan in terms of the amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) it receives? 

 Cisco IoT Transportation Capstone Project

Syed worked with his Cisco team to create an IoT solution for freight by rail to strengthen the national supply chain using Cisco technology. The team also presented it to a panel of Cisco employees. 

 TheWatch

In March 2020, everything changed for Avaneesh Babu and Syed Rayaan Ahmad. With the COVID-19 lockdown in full swing, Avaneesh and Syed noticed a COVID information gap in Loudoun's youth. To address it, the two created CoronaWatch with a mission to provide clear, concise, and consistent health-related information for the youth, by the youth. To start, they created a website publishing Daily Updates for Loudoun which were sorted into Good News and Not So Good News all relating to COVID-19 which was readable in under a minute. These updates shortly spread to the newly created Instagram account and continued all the way into March 2022. It was soon branched out to Fairfax & Global Updates, other social media, YouTube, interviewing government officials & community leaders, developing a brand new website, and much much more! Later, CoronaWatch transformed into TheWatch, a suite of organizations focusing on educating youth in much more than health with a community of 1000+ unique users. TheWatch includes CoronaWatch, MedConnect, and VisionWatch. For the efforts, Syed and Avaneesh became Virginia COVID-19 Community Ambassadors and were given the President's Volunteer Service Award.