What is the Cyber Lions?

The Cyber Lions is the sole and leading Cybersecurity organization at Pennsylvania State University’s Harrisburg campus. Although there are other Cyber Lions organizations across the various Penn State campuses, they are all independent of each other. Throughout this student-led club’s various lifecycles, it primarily engages in the following activities:

Workshops
Competitions
Networking opportunities
Open-discussions
Collaboration

The organization’s leadership consists of a President, Vice President, Director of Outreach, Director of Cybersecurity, and Treasurer; however, that is always subject to change.

My Involvement

As a freshman, I was quite motivated to succeed. During a meeting with the director of Penn State Harrisburg’s Cybersecurity program regarding how I could best apply myself in the college environment, I learned about the Cyber Lions club and their upcoming board elections.

Following this, I joined the organization and submitted my application for the Director of Outreach in December of 2023.

Director of Outreach

Once accepted, I began working on media content for the group, focusing primarily on reviving their social media account — which was only Instagram at the time — and preparing for the upcoming college club interest fair.

While visiting classrooms to give recruitment presentations, managing social media, and being a friendly face were my jobs, that was not all I did. The students elected into the President and Vice President roles had not interacted with the organization since their election, leaving me to juggle all aspects of the group’s management, recruiting, events, and compliance.

After much discussion with the school and the organization’s faculty advisor, the roles were made vacant. In February of 2024, I took their places.

President

As the President, I held many workshops, visited classrooms, coordinated with the school, planned networking events with local employers, vouched for funding, and advocated for members. I made it a point to encourage students of all majors, experience levels, and availability to join and interact with the club, regardless of campus or group affiliation. As such, every single event, workshop, and networking opportunity was accessible university-wide.

Some workshops I held during this time:

Introduction to the Linux Command Line (Debian)
Configuring and Utilizing Virtual Machines
Introduction to Networking
Introductory HackTheBox CaptureTheFlag (CTF) Walkthrough
Introduction to BASH and BATCH Scripting

NCL Fall 2024 Competition

Additionally, after learning about CyberSkyline’s National Cyber League (NCL) CTF Competition, I vouched for funding to register a team of seven students. On behalf of Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Business Administration (SBA), I was provided with enough funding to enter a team into this event, which began my first experience with a live-scored collegiate-level competition.

As a team, we spent the weekend coordinating our coverage over competition areas, ultimately finishing 433rd out of 4894, within the 91st percentile of teams.

The Team:

Although we did not place as high as we would’ve liked, it was a great learning experience and gave us valuable knowledge we’d need to succeed in the competition in the following seasons.

Read more about this experience with NCL and those that followed: here.

Board Additions

In November of 2024, I held board elections to allow the members to vote on candidates for:

Vice President (Carson Moore)
Treasurer (Sairus Shambach)

With these positions filled, I was able to focus on organizational management, team leadership, employer-university networking opportunities, funding for competitions and conferences, and workshops.

However, during this time, I was inspired by a conversation with a Penetration Tester who built environments for a previous DEFCON CTF event.

Cyber Lions CTF 2024

At this stage of my Cyber experience, this was by far my most technically challenging project. Between November and December of 2024, I independently designed, developed, configured, tested, and deployed a group of vulnerable systems for use as a CTF.

Without diving deep into the technical side of the environment, here is a brief overview of my configuration:

Containerized Ubuntu system A
- Apache 2.4.41
Containerized Ubuntu system B
- vsFTPd 2.3.4

On December 4th of 2024, students of various experience levels and majors spun up my Docker containers and worked their way through my systems, capturing flags and credentials along the way. In the end, I walked the group through the systems, explaining design choices and solutions. Some topics included, but were not limited to:

Stegonography
Credential Attacks
Data Manipulation
Directory Traversal
Backdoor Exploitation

Additionally, here is the flyer I made for the event!

However, that is all I’ll say about the environment. Read more about it: here!

After Spring break, we welcomed a new Director of Cybersecurity (Andrew Boyer), who was a great help with discussions and events.

The Start of the Spring 2025 Semester

Attending the club interest fair has always been an enjoyable experience, as I got the opportunity to share my cyber-related passions and interests with potential club members and incoming students.

Here is the flyer I made for the event:

Following the initial semester club interest fair, we held two introductory events:

Kali Linux & Command-Line Basics Workshop
Networking Fundamentals and Web Exploitation with Wireshark

The Hershey Public Library

Then, alongside routine club operations, I began working with Hershey Public Library event coordination staff. Together, we developed two individual programs:

Community User-Support
Community Digital Safety Awareness

Together, these two programs would eventually occur monthly and allow students to gain valuable experience volunteering for and working with the local Hershey community.

From this point until its launch in October of 2025, developing and promoting these programs became part of my regular tasks.

Here is the flyer I made for program recruitment:

Select Medical Forum Event

Before or around this time (I don’t remember!), I accepted my Select Medical Internship with the Incident Response team.

Read about the amazing experience I had, the knowledge I gained, and some of the projects I worked on, here.

Using connections made during the interview process, I coordinated a Select Medical Forum event in which the CISO and Incident Response Supervisor visited the campus. Here, they spoke to a group of students about their backgrounds, their experiences, and what life was like working in Information Technology.

Attending the BSides Harrisburg Conference

Thanks to the generosity of the BSides event organizers (namely Jessica Hoffman), our organization was granted full access to the event and was fully funded. This conference was very insightful and allowed us to immerse ourselves in a professional Cybersecurity environment while also providing the opportunity to network with security professionals.

Learn more about the event: here.

NCL Spring 2025 Competition

At the same time as the conference, we were also competing in another season of NCL — on behalf of Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Business Administration, I was given funding to register two teams of seven students.

Read more about this experience with NCL and those that followed: here.

NCL Fall 2025 Competition

Between the Spring and Fall competitions, regular events and workshops occurred.

Read more about this experience with NCL and those that followed: here.

Stepping Down

Although I thoroughly enjoyed being President and getting to host all of these great events and opportunities for myself and others, it was time to move on.

In October of 2025, I passed along the presidency to Andrew Boyer, who was the Vice President at the time.

PSU CCDC

In April of 2026, I joined a team of four other Penn State Harrisburg students to represent both Penn State Harrisburg and the Cyber Lions club at the CCDC Competition held by Penn State University Park’s Cybersecurity club, PSU CCSO.

This live-adversarial blue-team event was eye-opening, and it is undoubtedly the most fun I have had working with technology and cybersecurity. We placed third university-wide.

Read more about this experience: here.

NCL Spring 2026 Competition

Again, it was time for another NCL event.

Read more about this experience with NCL and those that followed: here.

Defensive Operations Lead

Following the PSU CCDC competition, Andrew Boyer, Ryan Snavely, and I started a Penn State competitive cybersecurity team.

This team is currently in progress, and I am taking the position of Defensive Operations Lead!