Comments on: 25C3 international Capture the Flag

By: nobody

nobody — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:42:01 +0000

its just not that interesting to watch. most of the hackers are also busy, and a parade of people shoulder surfing always ends the same “omg, whats he doing there?”

reverse engineering takes a lot of focus and is mentally draining. getting good at these sorts of things isnt something you do by watching. go curl up with a good book (might i recommend the intel manuals?) and a disassembler.

good luck to anybody here who enters the competition.

By: TJHooker

TJHooker — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:08:42 +0000

@yarr&nimrod: It’s the same deal with demoscene and crackers. Go look for demo sources or modern VM based unpacker sources. It’s the foundation for a social order, and all you can do is try to become better and make the others seem incompetent.

By: yarr

yarr — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:22:14 +0000

They are not much of a spectator sport. And afterwards, the teams dont seem to like to talk about what they were doing, and what worked and what did not.

By: nimrod

nimrod — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:24:14 +0000

well, the ctf events in the past congresses have been somewhat entertaining. if u think u can watch over the hackers shoulders, u are wrong. u just sit behind the lines and eat n drink and act quiet.
hang on, b4 u flame me, im just saying id like to see a projector or something just to follow the action. i know very well that u dont want any cheering at a ctf and that a ctf is not for entertainment.
its just me who would like to learn from the best.

my 2 cents

By: TJHooker

TJHooker — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:18:21 +0000

Most times the nodes just have generic vulnerabilities; they actually forbid you to run good memory protection and IDS solutions; unless they’ve changed the rules.

The real challenge is providing enough allowed process protection while finding the other teams vulnerabilities. It’s not easy by no means, but most of the teams use fuzzers for most of the work load.

I’ve never seen any real in depth black box pen testing done at the cc one or the defcon one. It’s probably because of lack of time I guess.