I Tried to Hack My Own Hackathon Project. It Took Ten Minutes

Back in February I helped build a thing called Sentinel Eye for the HyperSpace Innovation Hackathon.

The pitch was simple. You draw a box anywhere on a map, and the system goes and fetches Sentinel-2 satellite imagery for that exact patch of Earth, runs the math on it, and tells you where forest got cut down or where a city quietly ate a field. Draw a rectangle over the Amazon, wait a few minutes, get back real GeoTIFF files showing deforestation. It felt like magic. It got us to nationals. I was very proud of it.

Then the hackathon ended, the AWS credits dried up, and I tore the whole thing down before it could start charging me rent.

Fast forward a few months. I have been learning security properly, finished TCM's Practical Ethical Hacking course, and I now spend my evenings on PortSwigger labs like a normal well-adjusted person. And I had a cursed idea. What if I went back and read my own code from February, except this time I read it the way someone trying to break in would, instead of the way someone trying to survive a demo at 3am does?

It took about ten minutes to find the first hole. Then I found two more. Come look at the crime scene with me.