It’s definitely more fun to play with friends, or even internet strangers.
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Logistics and How to Find CTFs Wait! Before you go any further Check out Metasploitable in late November ( here is the announcement from 2018), or Hack The Box year-round. These are also fairly rare but a lot of fun. There are also CTFs that emulate pen testing, where you are given a target VM (“box”) to hack into, and escalate your privileges until you are a root user. These are fairly rare (and pretty difficult to set up, I imagine). There are a few attack/defense CTFs, where you are given control of a server that you must protect from other players, while also attacking other servers. Includes random puzzles, electronics-based things, OSINT, anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories. Forensics/Stego: given a PCAP file, image, audio or other file, find a hidden message and get the flag.Web: web-based challenges where you are directed to a website, and you have to find and exploit a vulnerability (SQL injection, XSS, etc.) to get a flag.Crypto: crypto means cryptography! Get an encrypted flag and figure out how to decrypt it (includes both classical and modern ciphers).to bypass normal functionality and get the program to read the flag to you. Pwn: get a binary and a link to a program running on a remote server.RE (reverse engineering): get a binary and reverse engineer it to find a flag.
The categories vary from CTF to CTF, but typically include: Most CTFs are “ jeopardy style", meaning that there are a handful of categories, and each of the (typically standalone) challenges falls in to one of those categories. By solving challenges, you (hopefully!) learn about a new concept, vulnerability, tool, class of attack, etc. You can then submit that flag for points… the player or team with the most points wins!Įach challenge is usually oriented around a single concept. Once you successfully solve a challenge or hack something, you get a “flag”, which is a specially formatted piece of text. : ) What is a CTF?ĬTF stands for “ capture the flag.” It’s a hacking competition where the challenges (or a hacking environment, or both) are set up for you to hack. It certainly isn’t the only CTF resource out there, but I find that a lot of the resources are either big information dumps (hard to pick through as a beginner) or links without context or guidance on how to improve. This is intended to be a guide for beginners who have just started playing CTFs (or for people who have never played, but would like to). There was a fantastic turnout, with 1,000 women playing! For many of the participants, it was their first time playing a CTF.Īfter the event was over, there was some discussion on what to do if you wanted to play more CTFs, if you got stumped a lot, etc. Last weekend, I played in the Women Unite Over CTF, hosted by WomenHackerz and several other organizations.