Cyber Conquest
A king-of-the-hill competition where every team defends its own infrastructure while attacking everyone else's. I held the defensive side — firewalls, service hardening, traffic monitoring — and helped on offense between incidents.
Profile
Cybersecurity · Digital forensics
Ansley Nats
B.S. Cyber Operations, Dakota State University — graduated May 2026.
Cybersecurity and digital forensics are two ends of the same problem, and I work at both. Defense is what happens while a system is running — hardening services, watching traffic, responding when something breaks. Forensics is what happens after: reconstructing events from a disk image or a packet capture, and documenting them clearly enough for someone else to act on.
I've defended live infrastructure in attack/defense competitions, built web applications end to end, and spent a year teaching 4th–6th grade girls to code through NCWIT. I'm looking for roles in security operations, incident response, and digital forensics.
At a glance
- Education
- B.S. Cyber Operations, minor in Computer ForensicsDakota State University · Graduated May 2026 · GPA 3.7
- Focus
- Network defense, incident response, digital forensics
- Based in
- New Boston, New HampshireOpen to relocating
- Recognition
- FS-ISAC Women in Cyber ScholarshipNCWIT NH Affiliate Rising Star Award
- Open to
- Internships and entry-level roles in DFIR and security operations
Selected work
Two things worth showing
All work →Photography Inspiration App
A multi-page site with image galleries and forms, backed by a Node.js API with full CRUD for mailing-list subscribers.
Writing
Work
Projects & competitions
Things I've built and broken
Coursework, competition, and side projects — the ones where I learned something I still use.
Competition
Cyber Conquest
- Competed in a king-of-the-hill format requiring teams to defend their own infrastructure and attack opposing systems simultaneously.
- Served as primary defender: configured firewalls, hardened services, and monitored network traffic to keep systems up and unauthorized access out.
- Contributed to offense by identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in opponent infrastructure and establishing persistence to hold points.
- Worked with teammates to protect simulated city infrastructure, balancing hardening against real-time incident response under time pressure.
Build
Photography Inspiration App
- Built a full-stack web app for photography inspiration in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Developed a Node.js backend with full CRUD operations for mailing-list subscriber management.
- Created a responsive frontend spanning multiple pages, forms, and image galleries.
Writing
Notes & write-ups
Writing
Case notes, competition write-ups, and things I figured out the hard way.
Post
Defending and attacking at the same time
Most cybersecurity coursework hands you one job at a time. You harden a box, or you find a way into somebody else's. Cyber Conquest hands you both at once and starts the clock.
The format is king-of-the-hill: every team runs its own infrastructure, every team is trying to take everyone else's, and points accrue for as long as you hold ground. I played primary defender, which sounds like the calmer seat until you realize the person next to you needs your attention on offense and your firewall rules are already three revisions behind.
Triage is the whole skill
The thing a lab exercise can't teach you is what to ignore. In a lab, every alert matters, because the exercise put it there. In competition, most of what crosses your screen is noise or someone else's problem, and the cost of chasing it is that the real intrusion gets twenty uninterrupted minutes.
What worked for me was deciding in advance what "up" meant for each service, and only reacting to things that threatened it. Everything else went in a list to look at when the board was quiet.
Write it down while it's happening
The other lesson was documentation. When you're hardening under pressure it feels like a waste of thirty seconds to note what you changed — until you're rolling back at hour three and can't remember whether the config that broke was yours or theirs.
That habit is the part I carried into forensics work. The analysis isn't finished when you understand what happened; it's finished when someone else can read your notes and reach the same conclusion.
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