CTF

I was late registering for the Huntress CTF this year. I joined a week late when there were already thousands of participants across thousands of teams competing to solve cybersecurity challenges as quickly as possible to place in the leaderboards. The Huntress CTF categories this year were in reverse engineering, binary exploitation, malware analysis, OSINT, web, forensics and miscellaneous categories - all categories which I have spent far too much time working in. I played solo and after catching up, consistently placed within the top 10. By the end, I was able to defeat every challenge from every category and wound up winning a limited-edition CTF Huntress T-shirt. ...

I grew up playing capture the flag both outside with friends and in Unreal Tournament, but a CTF competition in cybersecurity was new to me until hearing about the CyberDrain CTF. CTF competitions are designed to test a variety of cybersecurity skills, in purposefully-vulnerable setups. Flags, which are just bits of text could be hidden in all sorts of places, buried deep in source code, disguised within an encrypted message or behind vulnerable web applications, maybe lost in a corrupt database we don’t have the password for. The concept reminded me of Hack This Site and other hacking wargame sites I spent too much time on 20 years ago. ...