What is Capture The Flag?

Hello, welcome to the first post on my blog. In this post, I will be talking about the Capture The Flag competitions and why should every cyber security enthusiast should participate in the Capture The Flag AKA CTF competitions.

What are Capture The Flag competitions?

Capture the Flag (CTF) is a special kind of information security competitions. In these competitions, there are flags hidden behind various types of vulnerabilities and in order to capture these flags, you have to abuse these vulnerabilities and submit the aquired flag. The CTFs competitions are mostly played in teams with other CTF players but in every case, it is not that necessary. You can also play the Capture The Flag as a single player too.

Different types of Capture The Flag competitions

There are basically two types of Capture The Flag competitions:

1. Jeopardy Style CTF

2. Attack-Defense Style CTF

Jeopardy Style CTF Competitions

Jeopardy-style CTFs has a couple of questions (tasks) in range of categories. For example, Web, Forensic, Crypto, Binary or something else. Team can gain some points for every solved task. More points for more complicated tasks usually. The next task in chain can be opened only after some team solve previous task. Then the game time is over sum of points shows you a CTF winer. Famous example of such CTF is Defcon CTF quals.

Attack-Defense Style CTF Competitions

Attack-defence is another interesting kind of competitions. Here every team has own network(or only one host) with vulnarable services. Your team has time for patching your services and developing exploits usually. So, then organizers connects participants of competition and the wargame starts! You should protect own services for defence points and hack opponents for attack points. Historically this is a first type of CTFs, everybody knows about DEF CON CTF - something like a World Cup of all other competitions.

You can find the latest ongoing CTFs competition on CTFTime.org website.

Thank you for reading my post and I’ll see you in the next one. Have a good day 🙂