Over 150 participants challenged each other’s hacking skills regarding Cyber Security at the competition Aarhus Cyber Security CTF. By completing different Cyber Security challenges, teams are able to gain points in the form of flags, where the number of points gained depends on the difficulty of the challenge, the number of teams who had already solved the challenge and its specific topic. The competition lasted 24 hours, where participants of all abilities sought to not only improve their skills, but also to capture flags. The competition was Jeopardy-style with 5 categories and 30+ challenges, with topics such as:

·     Web exploitation (XSS, Authentication, Information, SQL-injections, etc.) 

·     Cryptography

·     PPC (algorithms to break stuff, automated playing games, etc.) 

·     Badly configured servers

·     Reverse engineering

Learn and Hack Your Way Through Challenges

The participants were mainly students from Aarhus University, however, everybody with an interest in cyber security were welcome. Having a prior knowledge of coding or mathematics would be a solid start, however, the event focused on being beginner-friendly, while also providing a challenge for the experienced hacker. If a team was struggling with a specific topic, they could improve their skills by attending one of the several talks and introductions or buy hints with their points, thus getting them back on track.

Casual competition

Although both pride and prices were at stake, the event had a casual and laidback vibe, where it was more about having fun than winning. Free pizza and coffee kept the energy levels high throughout the 24-hour competition. LEGO sponsored the prices, which went to the three best teams, and the winners of a lottery ticket-pool. The team “./dirtyc0w” - who were just 13-15 years old - convincingly won first place with 11,132 points, which was almost twice as many as the runners-up from team “TotalFailure”. 

The event, which was the first of its kind, was a huge success with over 150 attendees. If you want to participate in future events follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/datalogi/