Hackus: three days of intense hacking challenges
25 April 2011, 01:57
Just a quick post to say that I had a blast at the last Hackus. The whole competition was organized top-notch and the challenges gave us more to do than we had time for.
First, I’ve got to say that I always preferred the CTFs where we are all together than the ones that we do over the Internet so, Hackus being one of the former category, its a plus for them.
Then, the challenges, there was: a forensic challenge who quickly turned out into a twisted defensive / offensive CTF, Java reverse-engineering, Web exploitation, service exploitation oriented CTF, Web Application Firewall Evasion challenges, a very interesting and twisted social-engineering challenge with live actors and unexpected illegitimate access to hardware, cryptography, a handful of networking challenges with an unexpected IPv6 appearance (and we are sooo not ready!), general puzzle-solving, geek/hacker/cracker knowledge, hacker jeopardy, steganography, parties with DJs and more that I forget.
The organizers really outdid themselves: There was a lot of stuff covered, it was tremendously hard (keep in mind its all volunteer work!) and their infrastructure hosted all of this without even a wink. An all-across-the-board succes!
The networking challenges were especially welcomed from me since they are quite hard to set-up infrastructure-wise, never seen on CTFs over the Internet and are, in my opinion, quite important and often overlooked.
Finally, I guess the fact that we won probably also weighted in the fact that I enjoyed the event. That said, the competition has been very fierce until the end. Our team, Amish Security, had the chance of combining a lot of diverging abilities and talents into a cohesive team. Let me name drop here: Guillaume Germain, Gabriel Tremblay, François Proulx, Laurent Desaulniers, Pierre-Marc Bureau, Joan Calvet, Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn. All awesome, hard-working and talented people!
I also organized the Hacker Jeopardy portion of the event, which will have its own post.
I said short post at the beginning, I know, sorry about that..
Pictures by Rémi Menegon used in accordance to the CC license
— Olivier Bilodeau
