In a tense, closely fought three-day final tournament held at a Santo Domingo hotel, Universidad del Caribe (UNICARIBE) secured the top spot at the 2026 Intercollegiate Cybersecurity Capture the Flag (CTF) competition by a razor-thin nine-point margin.
The champion team finished with an overall score of 3,295 points, edging out second-place finisher Universidad Central del Este (UCE) which ended the competition with 3,286 points. The tight finish extended across the entire top tier of competitors: all five highest-ranking teams finished within an 84-point spread of one another, showcasing the high caliber of cybersecurity talent across Dominican higher education institutions.
Thirteen Dominican universities sent student teams to compete in the second iteration of the annual tournament, which was run as an official feature of ITLA Security Fest 2026 by co-organizers Pentraze Cybersecurity and the Instituto Tecnológico de Las Américas (ITLA). Leading financial and industry partners Banco Popular and the SANS Institute stepped in as official sponsors for the event.
For context, CTF, short for Capture the Flag, is a competitive cybersecurity format that pits teams against a series of hands-on security challenges. Each successfully solved challenge produces a unique verification code called a “flag,” with point values assigned based on the difficulty of the task. For this year’s competition, Pentraze cybersecurity specialists designed all challenges to mirror real-world cyber threats and work scenarios across six core cybersecurity domains: web exploitation, mobile exploitation, digital forensics, malware analysis, binary exploitation, and reverse engineering.
The tournament’s qualification process kicked off with an online individual preliminary round held from September 18 to 20. Advancing teams moved on to the team-based final, which ran from October 14 to 16 at Santo Domingo’s Hotel Catalonia. Each finalist team fielded 10 student participants, and entry to the competition was open to all participating institutions free of charge. Strict competition rules prohibited any external assistance, as well as the sharing of solutions or hints between competing teams.
Following the final score reveal, UNICARIBE Chancellor José Alejandro Aybar M. officially named the nine members of the institution’s 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. The team prepared for the tournament under the guidance of Gary Cabrera Columna, UNICARIBE’s vice chancellor for digital transformation.
In recognition of their historic win, Aybar announced that the university will award full academic scholarships to every member of the champion team.
Aybar emphasized the collective nature of the competition’s success, noting that the incredibly narrow margins at the top of the leaderboard meant the entire Dominican higher education ecosystem should share in the achievement. In addition to UNICARIBE and UCE, the third through fifth place spots went to Universidad APEC (UNAPEC), Universidad Domínico Americano (UNICDA), and host institution ITLA, respectively.
“Dominican higher education has won, with all the talent its students have shown and that our institutions help to develop,” Aybar said in a post-competition address.
He also framed the growing event as a key pipeline for industry employers, noting that “Companies can find the talent they need to staff their cybersecurity teams” by engaging with competitors at the annual tournament.