Also known as the iCTF.
I enlisted.
This is an international competition to test security skills of students. Every year when December comes, nerds gather in teams to protect a bunch of servers they’ve been held responsible to while other students try to defeat them. And vice versa.
It will be fun.
“The upcoming iCTF will be held on December 4th, 2009, from 8am to 5pm, PST.” In our timezone this means from 5pm to 2am. And our team will have a name and a logo too (undisclosed yet) ! This is gonna awesome !
The rules are pretty basic :
The goal of each team is to maintain a set of services such that they remain available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team also has to attempt to compromise other teams’ services. Since all the teams received an identical copy of the virtual host, each team has to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the hosts and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service allows a team to bypass the service’s security mechanisms and to “capture the flag” associated with the service.
Helm’s Deep
I heard that they’re supposed to give us the copies of the hosts only 2 hours before the challenge begins.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ll be very useful to the team. There are some real hackers in my class and our professors will be helping too so I think I’ll do the massages, bring food and Redbull to our warriors and that’s it. Maybe I’ll blog or tweet live from the event but i’m afraid other teams notice and use these informations to defeat us. We’ll see.
Anyway, we’re having some meetings and training sessions with the team starting tomorrow and I downloaded the virtual machines from last year to practice a little bit.
I keep you in touch.
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