Capture The Flag Competition Leads To Cybersecurity Career
DARKReading, September 19,2025
As Splunk celebrates the 10th anniversary of Boss of the SOC competition, it continues to be a valuable platform for security professionals to test their skills, learn new techniques, and potentially advance their careers.
Splunk's Boss of the SOC (BOTS) capture-the-flag (CTF) competition didn't start out as a recruitment event, but for some cybersecurity professionals, taking part in the event has helped them progress in their careers. It even led to one participant getting a job with Splunk.
For the past 10 years, the security company has hosted BOTS, a blue team CTF competition, as one of many events during its .conf user conference. Participants compete under real-world pressure to investigate scenarios and answer a series of incident response (IR) questions using Splunk tools. The scenarios are based on the previous year's most impactful real-world attacks.