Capture the Flag Competition Leads to Cybersecurity Career

Capture the Flag competitions aren’t just for fun they can shape cybersecurity careers, as Splunk’s Boss of the SOC (BOTS) blue-team capture-the-flag event demonstrates during its annual .conf conference. According to Splunk, the 10-year-old contest tests participants’ incident response skills under real-world pressure and has helped some move into Splunk roles, including a participant who was promoted to SOC manager after finishing first.

The event also inspired Katie Brown’s path into Splunk, where she has now worked for seven years and was recently promoted to director of platform security. The scenarios draw on high-profile past attacks, with Log4J-based activity used in 2022, and this year’s challenges spotlighted AI themes such as threat detection, incident response and insider threats.

Cisco completed its acquisition of Splunk in March 2024, a change that organisers say helps keep BOTS alive as a gateway to recruitment and broader security education. September 19, 2025 marks the publication date of this feature by Arielle Waldman, with the piece noting that for some participants the competition is a springboard into meaningful careers.