☘️ St. Paddy's Week · Ohio · In-Person

MARCH 2026 | COLUMBUS, OH

MARCH { MADNESS }

8 teams. Single-elimination. Detection engineering.
No vendor pitch. No lunch-and-learn. Just a room full of practitioners putting their detection skills to the test — bracket-style. ☘️ Happy hour to follow.

// Why show up

Not a Webinar. Not a Lunch & Learn.

This is a room full of people who love the thrill of the hunt and know the pain of noisy alerts and brittle correlation rules. No execs, no pressure — just practitioners proving their skills.

🏀

Competitive Format

Bracket-style tournament, not a demo. Head-to-head detection engineering challenges with elimination rounds. Prove you're the best in the room.

🤝

Peer Community

No execs, no sales pressure. A room full of detection engineers, threat hunters, and SOC practitioners from Ohio's security community. Your people.

🎯

Low Pressure, High Value

No pitch. Just a few hours of hands-on detection challenges with people who get it. Walk away sharper than you walked in.

☘️

St. Paddy's × March Madness

The timing is fun, the vibe is relaxed, and there's a happy hour to follow. Come for the competition, stay for the green beer.

🚫

Zero vendor pitch. Seriously. This isn't a thinly veiled product demo. It's a community event for practitioners, by practitioners. We just want to get Ohio's best detection engineers in a room and let them compete.

// The format

Detection Engineering, Bracket-Style

Hands-on detection challenges hosted on CTFd. Each round, two teams go head-to-head — building detections, hunting threats, writing queries, and mapping to MITRE ATT&CK. Fastest and most accurate team advances. Losers go home.

Round 01

Quarterfinals

8→4 teams. Four head-to-head matches. Detection challenge sets covering threat hunting, query writing, and alert triage. Speed matters.

Round 02

Semifinals

4→2 teams. Harder challenges, more layers. Multi-stage detection scenarios — investigate, build the detection logic, validate, repeat.

Round 03

Grand Final

2→1 team. The final two battle it out live. Real-world threat scenario. Full detection engineering workflow under pressure. One champion.

// What you'll face

Detection Challenge Areas

Challenges are designed around the real-world detection engineering lifecycle — the kind of work you do every day, turned into a competition.

🔍

Threat Hunting

Find the needle in the haystack across real datasets

⚙️

Detection Writing

Build detection logic that actually fires on the right things

🗺️

MITRE ATT&CK

Map threats to TTPs and identify coverage gaps

📊

Alert Triage

Separate signal from noise under time pressure

🧩

Log Analysis

Parse, correlate, and make sense of security telemetry

💡

Query Craft

SPL, KQL, SQL — write the queries that find the threats

// The day

One Afternoon. One Champion.

Arrival

Check-In & Setup

Grab a name tag, find your team's table, connect to the network. Coffee's on us.

Kickoff

Welcome & Bracket Reveal

Quick intro — no slides, no keynote. Live bracket seeding on the screen. Meet your first opponent.

Round 1

Quarterfinals — 4 Matches

8 teams, 4 head-to-head matches. Detection challenges on CTFd. Top 4 advance.

Break

Regroup & Bracket Update

Catch your breath. Updated bracket on screen. Semifinal matchups revealed.

Round 2

Semifinals — 2 Matches

4 remaining teams, harder challenges. The room gets quieter. Stakes go up.

Final Round

Grand Final

Last 2 teams battle it out live. Everyone watches. One team walks away champion.

☘️ After

Happy Hour

Awards, drinks, war stories. St. Paddy's week — you've earned it.

// Limited spots

8 Teams. That's It.

Teams of 2–4 practitioners. First come, first served. Bring your detection engineers, threat hunters, SOC analysts — the people who live in the logs.

// team_registration.sh

☘️ St. Paddy's week · March Madness vibes · Columbus, OH ☘️