ZATAZ

Security Researcher Earns Second Place in Hackfest Quebec Social Engineering CTF Using Custom Tools

A journalist competed for the seventh time in the Social Engineering CTF at Hackfest de Québec, finishing second among twenty participants. The event required building an OSINT report on 28 companies including Decathlon, Ikea, Air Canada and Home Depot, followed by timed phone calls to extract information from real employees. The competitor developed five custom tools including an intelligent directory, a sound ambiance synthesizer and a private AI for handling objections during calls. Preparation involved a full week of open-source research yielding 95 percent of answers before any calls, with the remaining score determined by 30-minute phone sessions. In the final round the journalist adopted the persona of a union representative conducting a salary survey, drawing on local Quebec media coverage to build credible context. The performance resulted in 39 direct answers from employees out of 67 objectives and reinforced the lesson that tools alone cannot replace human understanding in social engineering scenarios.