On the 27th of December, NYP InfoSec held our two day long December Capture The Flag (CTF) competition. This was our first time hosting such a long event, and we started preparations way back in September. Keeping participants entertained for that long takes a lot of work! All together, we had more than fifty challenges across eight categories.
We tried another special idea this year: All the challenges would follow a common scenario and theme. This made brainstorming challenge ideas much easier, and also helped all our challenges appear part of a bigger mission.
This time, our CTF revolved around stopping an fictional hacker group known as EternalWinter from freezing the planet Earth.
To set the theme of the event, we designed our own custom CTF landing page that explained each category.
We kicked the event off at 12pm with a short introduction to the CTF platform, as well as an important reminder on the cybersecurity laws in Singapore. Once this was done, it was time to capture some flags! Our participants raced to crack codes, extract hidden data and hack websites in order to find the flags. The top spot on the scoreboard was passed around several times during the first hour of the competition.
Instead of releasing all our challenges at once, we divided them into three parts, and released a new wave every few hours. Our second wave of challenges was released at 6pm and contained more challenges from each category.
At 8pm the next day (the 28th of December), we released our final wave of challenges. Many participants got up especially early to get a head start. Not an easy thing to do during the holidays!
At 12pm, we observed the CTF competition tradition of 'freezing' the scoreboard. This means that any points earned are no longer visible to other competitors. The next four hours was a nervous experience for participants as they continued to solve challenges without any idea of how everyone else was doing.
When the CTF finally ended at 4pm, we took a short break to tabulate the scores. While waiting for the results, competitors swapped tips and stories about how they had solved the puzzles. Then, we returned for a closing ceremony to announce the winners of NYP December CTF. Our challenge creators also explained the solutions to some of their creations.
Congratulations to our winners: Dylan, Jong Han, and Jun Hui!
Thanks to all our participants and we hope to see you again soon!
Our next CTF competition will take place in May 2022. If you'd like to be the first to hear about it, please consider joining our discord server.
CREDITS
Administrative Management: Gregory Choong and Edwin Chua
Scenario Development and Design: Mark Bosco
Server and Hosting Management: Carl Voller
Publicity: Jeremy Chong
Emcee: Elton Tay
Challenges created by:
Greogry Choong
Edwin Chua
Jeremy Chong
Mark Bosco
Arvin Lum
Derrick Png
Carl Voller
Elton Tay
Goh Ee Sheng
Ho Xin Ying
Lim Yong En
Tan Chee Qing
FUN FACT
During the CTF, we hid a flag somewhere on this website. Can you find it?