Competition UCSB iCTF 2020

Next week Friday, the UCSB iCTF 2020 takes place, and Nalys is going to participate in this years event.

What?

A CTF is basically a special kind of information security competition where teams compete against each other to solve (hack) challenges made by the organizers. The goal is to find keys (flags) in the challenges and submit them for points. The team that is able to solve the most challenges wins the contest.

The iCTF is an Attack/Defense CTF, which is a little different than a normal CTF, best explained with a quote from their website (https://ictf.cs.ucsb.edu/):

"In traditional editions of the iCTF competition, 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 the other teams' services. Since all the teams received an identical copy of the virtual host containing the vulnerable services, 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."

You don't need any computer security experience, and from my experience, a good understanding of Linux systems is more than enough to perform really well. You only need a laptop and a good mood. The important part is being able to quickly get to know the system and solve the problems, which is exactly where us Nalys engineers are best at.

So, if you ever wanted to take up the challenge against hackers from all over the world, put on your black hat and join us next week at the Nalys Brussels office.

When?

Friday 6th of March

Let's meet up at 18h30, the competition starts at 19h (and runs 6 hours).

(You don't need to be on time and can join/leave in at any point, but it's better to be there from the start)

Where?

Nalys Brussels office

Don't forget to confirm your attendance by accepting the calendar invite that you received. If you want to participate and you haven't receive the mail invitation, please contact Thomas De Backer