WiredIn | Our Infosec Team
By now some of you may have heard the name, but this blog is more than a mere introduction. I’ll be upfront about what this post is and what it isn’t. This is not an instruction manual nor is this a guide on how to apply. It is, I hope, an honest account of what we’re building, why we’re building it, and what it means for you, whether you’re a seasoned CTF player, or you’ve only recently started to find security interesting and aren’t quite sure what to do about it.
Infosec recruitment this year looks different from previous years. We’ve formalized something that existed only loosely before, a dedicated team, with its own identity and its own competitive presence, operating within PClub.
That team operates under the name WiredIn. I want to explain what that actually means, because I think the name alone doesn’t do enough of the work.
Why a team and why now
If you’ve spent enough time playing CTFs, you would have realized by now that going solo has a ceiling. Though it’s not a low ceiling; you can learn an enormous amount on your own, and I’d encourage anyone reading this to do exactly that regardless of whether they end up in WiredIn. But the competitions that genuinely challenge you, the competitions that are worth competing for, require teamwork. They require a group of people who can coordinate under pressure, have specializations in different domains and have a rhythm of working together when time is running out and the problem isn’t giving anything away easily.
What we lacked until now was a structure that gave the team a dynamic home inside the club. People interested in infosec were secies like any other, doing their domain work and competing in CTFs on the side. We’ve changed that with WiredIn.
What being a part of WiredIn actually looks like
There are two ways to be a part of WiredIn, I’ll lay out each and won’t make either sound like an obvious choice.
The first is as a WiredIn member; someone who is on the team, competing in CTFs, developing their specialization, contributing to the team’s collective knowledge without taking on secy responsibilities. If your goal is purely getting good at Infosec and competing, this might be the right track for you. It is a complete and serious (believe me when I stress this) commitment, not a lesser version of anything. It also doesn’t close other doors; being a WiredIn member leaves you free to pursue secy roles in other SnT clubs if that’s where your interests also lie.
The second is as a PClub secretary; which means everything a WiredIn member does, plus the responsibilities of conducting sessions on campus, outreach and carrying the secy role within PClub. The actual additional upside of this is that you are embedded in the club alongside people from Dev, ML, CP and systems; a cross-domain peer group which, I think, shapes how you approach problems in ways that are difficult to anticipate but real. This is a different kind of ownership and it suits a different kind of person.
I’d encourage you to think carefully about which one actually appeals to you. The club doesn’t operate on rigid domain lines (you must’ve seen it already by now if you were a spring camp mentee). Secretaries work across domains, people grow into new areas even after joining, and the path into WiredIn from a different domain too is not permanently closed, just longer. I’ll say that the direct path is in through the infosec task, and we’ll figure out together which position you fit into in interviews based on what you want and what you bring.
On the resources we sent
We made a deliberate decision to share resources before recruitment. I want to explain the reasoning behind it, because I think it matters.
Infosec is not a domain that you can cram for in the week before a deadline. The gap between someone who has been practicing for some time i.e. solving challenges, reading writeups etc, and someone who hasn’t, is visible immediately. We didn’t want access to resources to be the factor that separated those two people. So we removed that variable.
You are supposed to go through the resources, learn new topics and apply the learnings while solving the challenges. We aren’t expecting you to get all the flags correct (given the challenges will be cross domain), but we expect you to atleast have good basic knowledge in all core domains and intermediate-to-advanced specialization in any one of them.
What we’re looking for
We are not expecting you to be an expert already. What we’re paying attention to is simple; did you actually try to understand what was going on and what you were doing, or did you find a way around having to understand it? The difference between these two shows up easily in writeup submissions and even more clearly in the interview stage. We’ll filter the submissions before they even reaches the interview stage if we find them LLM generated. Sure, use LLMs to understand a concept or to research on a topic, but writing a writeup where we’re looking for your thought process using an LLM? Then you’re missing the point entirely.
On specialization; web exploitation, binary exploitation, cryptography, forensics, OSINT, and reversing; if you’ve already started spending time on it, bring it. We’d rather have someone who knows one thing well rather than one who’s only skimmed through everything. You can always pick up new areas once you’re in.
If you’re still deciding whether to attempt the task
Attempt it. I’m saying this not because the process is fun or something like that, but just because if you are reading this and still thinking about it, you’re probably interested enough that not attempting will bother you more than attempting it and not getting through. The task will be hard. Start anyway.
The door is open. Walk through it.
Website: wiredin.pclub.in
Author: Ketan Aggarwal
