Growing Capture the Flag Around the World
Build the curriculum, develop partnerships, teach everyone, grow Capture the Flag.
The Story So Far
Roppers was born when I was the training officer for the US Naval Academy's competitive cyber security team back in 2016. I needed to train a bunch of new students and there wasn't any material on the internet that explicitly focused on teaching beginners how to be self-sufficient and confident in their technical abilities.
I graduated and drove warships for a few years, but I still had the time to do curriculum development and in 2019, Roppers Academy was born.
My goal for this site was to become the best place on the internet for a beginner to take their first steps into the field. Five years into the journey, I think I've accomplished my initial goals. The next step, and what I am most focused on now is to extend this curriculum into as many classrooms as I can and for this to become the place that everyone is confident recommending as their go-to.
Roppers is derived from a word I made up to describe people who write Return Oriented Programming (ROP) exploits. Most importantly, it rhymes with the name of Admiral Grace Hopper for when we call ourselves "Hopper's Roppers".
We are here to provide guidance to new students during their first steps of their journey into cyberspace and then send them off on their own, with a solid foundation and headed in the right direction. I hope to have given them the tools, techniques, community, and the hacker mentality required to address any problem that comes their way.
Learn about our Educational Philosophy
Teaching Tacit Knowledge to Create Experts
Roppers exists to create more experts in the room, not more people who go to the experts for help. Check out these posts on the educational theory that underpins the site to get an understanding of what makes Roppers different.
The Team
Lead Instructor Dennis Devey
I work for the US Navy doing Digital Forensics and Incident Response. Back in school I was on our competitive Cyber Security Team and focused on building training for new members. I made this website to continue the work I had done and to share it with the widest audience possible.
Contact
For support, feedback, or if you just want to say hello, my email is [email protected]
Community Guidelines
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Privacy Policy
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Terms of Service
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Content License
All content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Email me if you have questions.
Legal Disclaimer
Opinions expressed on this site and training materials are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of the US Navy or any government organization.