Proud to have successfully led "PhishTrap", an immersive phishing simulation challenge where participants took on the role of adversaries to ethically breach human-layer defenses through advanced phishing tactics and social engineering techniques.
- B. Sree Divya – Senior Advisor & Event Coordinator
- Kanne Karthik – Peer Lead, OSINT Strategist & Profile Architect.
A special note of gratitude to our Faculty Coordinators, Lab Incharges, and Malla Reddy University - Department of Cyber Security & IoT for championing this unique cybersecurity initiative and entrusting us with the opportunity to coordinate and execute such a technically demanding event.
Building the Phishing Simulation Infrastructure I built the entire phishing simulation environment from scratch using Kali Linux CLI, Python, Flask which significantly strengthened my technical skills in CLI-based orchestration, phishing simulation design, and secure service deployment.
Mailhog – Controlled phishing mail distribution with real-time mail logging. Ngrok – Secure tunneling for exposing local phishing portals to the web. Apache2 – Hosting lookalike phishing sites and static payload pages. Custom Scripts – Traffic logging, spoof simulations, and attacker-side logic.
This environment allowed a sandboxed, controlled-yet-realistic platform for participants to simulate spear-phishing scenarios in a dynamic multi-target ecosystem.
- ✅ Perform deep OSINT on pre-built persona-based targets
- ✅ Craft personalized phishing emails with strategic social engineering
- ✅ Deploy lookalike portals using spoofing methods and mimic tactics
- ✅ Employ deception methods (spoofed sender, fake document names, cloaked URLs)
- ✅ Understand and leverage target psychology to ethically trick victims
- ✅ Log captured data and document impact trails for analysis
This wasn’t a plug-and-play task — this was a realistic phishing simulation, challenging participants to build trust, deceive, and ethically infiltrate systems using authentic phishing tactics.
- Creative Narration of targets and story building.
- Building multi-user, multi-target phishing ecosystems.
- Behavioral logic mapping for phishing narratives.
- Coordinating team logistics + real-time evaluation during live sessions.
- Creating controlled phishing attack surfaces using best practices.
Kudos to the Winners — 🥇Rupa Karedla & 🥈Sree Navya B — your OSINT creativity, crafted narratives, and behavioral attacks were exceptional! Your submissions reflected maturity, ethical creativity, and strategic execution.