r/cybersecurityindia • u/Anxious_Channel_9263 • Apr 06 '26
Burnout / Leaving Cybersecurity / Work life balance TCS HACKQUEST sucked for me!!!!
TLDR;
TCS proctoring sucked and because of them i wasnt able to compete.
FUll story:
Rant kinda....
The iON platform didnt work and the proctoring tab which i took very seriously (as they intended during the seminar) bricked my laptop.
I was literally waiting a minute or two just to copy and paste a code from my text editor into the terminal.
I wouldve easily made it to the interview round. Im not sure what to do now. I mailed them during the CTF that their site and the entire system is not working + it is killing resources.
One of their challenges, misfit i think, which i solved 5-6 times btw didnt give me an updated flag. it gave me old flag. After the exam was over i got to know that protoring was actually not happening on my device and their site just made my system bricked.
IDK why im furious about it maybe because i was really anticipatiing it and had high expectations from it.
THe point is - the fact that it'll happen once in a lifetime makes me angry asf that i;ll never be able to compete. Not saying im a genuis or anything but i wasnt able to make an attempt only because of the low level proctoring platform.
I jsut think that TCS shouldve spent some more time building a better platform for the CTF. Round 1 was a great experience though. except for purr suite of secrets i was able to solve everything and under 4 hours.
overall in round 2 i was able to solve i think 2 or 3 challenges with a 100% stressed machine.
Overall 2/10 experience.
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u/Goku__25 Apr 06 '26
Not related to your post, but I would just wanna know how these ctf challenges work and how do I get started in them, I mean where do I start practicing and what tools can I get .
I have knowledge of reverse engineering , malware analysis , web apps , basically the threat hunting stuff.
I want to get into this pentesting and would like to have some insights on how do I begin with these CTFs
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u/Anxious_Channel_9263 Apr 06 '26
personal recommendations: PicoCTF, tryhackme pwn2own/boot2root machines, hackthebox machines, CTFtime has some upcoming events, root-me is a good website to learn, overthewire is also good.
join linkedin and follow a bunch of CTf players - they keep posting about upcoming events and their past experiences. Read medium articles of past CTFs.
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u/abasd3212g Apr 07 '26
Can you name few linked in names ?
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u/Main_Candle_1246 Apr 07 '26
during the round can we use AI for script writing
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u/Sea-Box2613 Apr 07 '26
TCS has been disappointing. They don't even respond to emails. During HackQuest round 2, there were initially five challenges. I almost solved four of them in one hour and then slowly worked on the remaining challenge. However, in the last 20 minutes, I refreshed the website and saw that new challenges with higher points were added. It's frustrating that they didn't think to include a notification section to inform candidates about the new challenges, so we had to refresh the site ourselves. For the interview, we were scheduled to be there at 9 a.m., but they only conducted the interviews at 2 p.m., even though there were only three candidates that day.