CTF, Capture the flag competition. A great way to learn and compete in Hacking stuff!
Happy Friyaay or Friday if you prefer that way! But moving in the weekend i want to give a push for Cybersecurity educations and CTF(Capture the flag) which is a competition where you get different challenges in different categories, which could be Web, Crypto and Osint to name a few, there is a lot more fun categories!
So a Capture the flag competition is most likely to be played in Jeopardy style, and this means the amount of points you can win per “Flag” decreases with the amount of people that solves it, so if you are among the first you will earn more points, so being quick is rewarding.
So what is it more technical, capture the flag? Well for an example category Web, you are tasked to “hack” a website or application, it could be that you need to find a way to login as Admin, performing Sqli or a SSRF attack. But the goal is to find a string that most of the time looks like this “flag{hash_or_l337}” often a bit more themed to the challenges or the people hosting. But basically it is hidden somewhere on the website/application and you need to find it and input it on another site to “cash” in the points!
Crypto. You get a encrypted string or file, maybe some hints what it is for kind of cryptography or even a self built one so you need to find a way to decrypt or crack the string.
OSINT. Open source Intelligence, this is one of the challenges where some people just blow me away how they find stuff! What you do is you get a Username, Company or even just an image, and then you need to use, search engines and social medias to find the next clue. It could be a photo of a plane wing, then you need to find out what is the airline that have that plane, where does it fly, any information where the location is in the photo and then maybe find the persons instagram and so on, and finally you find a flag! Example of a challenge is below!
So if you want to have some gamification of finding vulnerabilities and compete against others! I recommend CTF’s, often free and you can win some fun stuff, even if you do not get top 3 you may win by participating.
CTF’s i will compete in now in march is the following:
PicoCTF: This is a CTF that is for students and others, hosted and created by Carnegie Mellon University. It begins March 12th and ends 26th of March. It have great varitety of easy to hard and a lot of categories.
Cyber Apocalypse 2024: Hacker Royale: HackTheBox is the one that hosts the CTF. They are a great learning platform for Hacking as well.
9th of March to 13th, so it ends just around when PicoCTF starts! So you can be very busy in March!
I will be joining and competing in these at least, in some of them i compete by myself and in at least one i will be joined by some teammates, and that will be fun!
So are you going to compete against me? It is a really fun way to test your skills and to learn new stuff! After the CTF’s there is usually writeups, documentation on how you could solve the challenge so you will learn what you have missed and how other solved it as well!
I will be posting a bit more of CTF and what platforms there is so you can learn more about hacking and to compete in CTF’s.
If you want to reach out i have setup an email for you to get in contact with me! If you have any questions about CTF’s or anything else please reach out!
Email: thevikingskulls@proton.me
Twitter/X: @acidfrogsweden
And if you want to buy me a coffe, link is below!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mrfroggy
