Hello everyone, welcome back!
This time I'm summarising 2025 — what I went through this year.
Another fun year. I did a lot of things, met many new friends and colleagues, tried things I'd never done before, traveled abroad, shared knowledge with others, created CTF challenges, competed. It was a great year. I earned certifications, ran labs, and most importantly — I now have my own CVE (CVE-2025–48878).
I'd give this year 8/10 because I didn't sit CAPE or CISSP.
Certifications and labs completed this year:
- Certified Red Team Analyst [CRTA] V.1 — sharp backdoor techniques
- Tenable Vulnerability Management Specialist — the written portion was harder than the practical
- Hack The Box Certified Penetration Testing Specialist (HTB CPTS) — does the hash include a trailing full stop?
- The Penetration Tester 1 (PT1) — AD/Network was so easy I had to pivot to web wizardry, and the web portion nearly finished me
- Red Team Infrastructure Developer (CRT-ID) — EZ
- OffSec Experienced Penetration Tester (OSEP) — went straight to hospital after the exam, purely for the secret flag
- HTB Prolab Zephyr and Cybernetics — seriously intense AD labs
- Certified Red Team Operations (CRTO) — that red sword badge is stunning
- Certified Red Team Analyst [CRTA] V.2 — what even is this challenge
- Certified Active Directory Pentesting eXpert (C-ADPenX) — failed on the first attempt
- Certified Active Directory Red Team Specialist (AD-RTS) — gorgeous cert design
- Certified Network Security Practitioner (CNSP)
- Burp Suite Certified Practitioner — cracked both as expected; ridiculously hard
Year highlights:
- Invited to deliver a Cybersecurity session at PIM
- Sec Playground Hackloween — 1st place out of 88 teams
- Thailand Cyber Top Talent 2025 — 14th in qualifiers; got wrecked in the Mobile category
- Holmes CTF (Blue Team CTF) — 28th out of 6,136 teams
- Hack Scammer CTF — 6th in qualifiers, absolutely crushed in finals (Mobile again)
Also published several blog posts on Medium: https://sabastiaz.medium.com/
That's about it for this year. See you in the next one!
