UNICARIBE wins national cybersecurity competition by 9 points as top five finish within 84
Santo Domingo.- Nine points settled it. After a three-day final at a Santo Domingo hotel, the Universidad del Caribe (UNICARIBE) took first place at the 2026 Intercollegiate Cybersecurity CTF with 3,295 points, just ahead of the Universidad Central del Este (UCE), which finished with 3,286.
Students from 13 Dominican universities took part. The top five teams finished within 84 points of one another.
The contest, now in its second edition, was organized by Pentraze Cybersecurity and the Instituto Tecnológico de Las Américas (ITLA) as part of ITLA Security Fest 2026. Banco Popular and the SANS Institute sponsored it.
CTF stands for Capture the Flag. Teams solve security challenges, and each solution yields a code, or “flag,” worth points based on difficulty. Pentraze specialists designed the challenges around real-world scenarios in six areas: web exploitation, mobile exploitation, digital forensics, malware analysis, binary exploitation and reverse engineering.
The path to the final began with an online individual qualifier from Sept. 18 to 20. The team final, with ten students per team, ran from Oct. 14 to 16 at the Hotel Catalonia. Participation was free. The rules barred outside help and any swapping of solutions or hints between teams.
UNICARIBE Chancellor José Alejandro Aybar M. named the nine students on the winning roster: Carlos Efraín Guillermo Rodríguez, Mariobanex de Jesús Viñas Castro, Francis Manuel Segura Feliz, Oliver Gabriel de León Araujo, Ronald Sebastián Serre Lorenzo, Ricardo Pérez, Winnier Antonio Alcántara Freeman, Julio Edward Correa Javier and Franley Yoskar Soto Mejía. They trained under Gary Cabrera Columna, the university’s vice chancellor for digital transformation.
The university will award a full scholarship to every member of the champion team, Aybar said.
He spread the credit around. Given the narrow gaps at the top, he said, UNICARIBE shares the title with UCE, the Universidad APEC (UNAPEC), the Universidad Domínico Americano (UNICDA) and ITLA, which placed second through fifth.
“Dominican higher education has won, with all the talent its students have shown and that our institutions help to develop,” Aybar said.
He also pitched the contest to employers. “Companies can find the talent they need to staff their cybersecurity teams,” he said.
