![]() ![]() On the other hand, on April 20, 2019, a six-day competition run by the Computer Security Club of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, VA will be held. Late 2018 saw the Trend Micro CTF 2018, with the final in Tokyo, which includes a king-of-the-hill competition. Most of the events on CTFTime are held by small groups of security enthusiasts, but not all. The National Cyber League (NCL) organizes Jeopardy-style competitions aimed at high school and college students. The big events like DEF CON are held in one location, but most CTFs are online and worldwide. Another famous CTF happens at the annual NorthSec conference in Montreal. The complete archives of past DEF CON CTFs are available on their servers. The winners of the DEF CON 26 CTF in August 2018 were the DEFKOR00T team. If CTFtime is the ESPN of CTF, then the Super Bowl of CTF is at DEF CON, the annual hacker conference in Las Vegas. Of the 152 events in the archive for 2018, 16 are attack-defend, 135 are Jeopardy-style. One of the main places these events are organized is on the site CTFtime. Groups all over the world hold open competitions all the time. “Ultimately, any type of training that puts a security pro outside their comfort zone is a benefit.” Where to find capture the flag events Why would you choose one type of contest over another? Kuzma says that “Jeopardy events are good for building problem solving skillsets.” King of the Hill events are excellent for strengthening incident response, collaboration, and planning. It is a variation of the attack-defend CTF. When the clock runs out, the team that held it longest is the winner. ![]() King of the hill In a King-of-the-hill event, each team tries to take and hold control of a server. Used with permission of the CTF blog site Ox002147 When the clock runs out, the team with the most points wins.īecause they are much easier to set up and administer, Jeopardy-style competitions are far more common than attack-defend. If a team takes a particular challenge and finds the flag, they submit it to the scoring system, get the points, and move on to the next challenge. Jeopardy-style Jeopardy-style tournaments have any number of teams and a Jeopardy-style board with challenges worth different numbers of points. Certainly, if the attacker can get root access the game will soon be over, but depending on the applications and services involved, more limited attacks may be sufficient. The attacker, on the other hand, uses penetration techniques to gain privileged access to the server. In such a scenario, defenders need to do all the things they would want to do on their own real-world servers: Patch all software vulnerabilities, even the obscure ones leave open only the very necessary services through the firewall make sure all passwords are strong and that accounts are given the least privilege necessary and so on. This is where the name “capture the flag” comes from (that and the traditional outdoor game). Each system contains a number of informational flags that the attacker tries to find and capture. Each team tries to attack the other’s systems and defend their own from attack. I’ll get to other tools that are more specifically geared toward CTF, but first, let me review the two main styles of CTF: attack-defend and Jeopardy-style.Īttack-defend In an attack-defend competition, there are two teams, each with a computing environment, which may be as simple as a single server. They are invaluable for examining and creating malicious files. You can find them all in his GitHub repository. Didier’s original specialty is tools to analyze PDFs, Microsoft Office documents and other complex data files, many of which are used to perpetrate attacks. One personal favorite resource of mine is Didier Stevens and his tools. All security experts have their own sets of favorite tools, but a CTF may challenge them to find new ones. All hacking resources, defensive and offensive, are CTF resources: source and binary static analysis, packet capture, debuggers, decompilers, heap visualizers, hash crackers, image editors and network scanners. A few examples include awesome-ctf, AnarchoTechNYC and zardus. ![]() Some of the resources are for building CTFs and some help those who are competing, and there is a good deal of overlap. You can find many lists of CTF resources with a simple web search a large number of them are on GitHub. It helps get people, especially students, excited about cybersecurity, and identifies promising non-traditional candidates.” Bobby Kuzma, director, cyber threat strategy and enablement for IT automation and security software vendor HelpSystems, says “I see a decent number of enterprises actually use CTFs as part of their community outreach and recruiting strategies. ![]()
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