Battle for Invitation Cards is Over

Less than a week is left until the information security forum Positive Hack Days 2012, and until today everybody who wanted to visit this event had a chance to win an invitation card in such contests as Blow Up the Town and Hackers vs. Forensics.

10 invitation cards were played in each competition (1st place — 5 tickets, 2nd place — 3 tickets, 3rd place — 2).

Blow Up the Town was taking place from May 7 to 25. Participants had to solve various tasks and obtain special keys (flags); these keys were to be submitted to the jury via a form on the participants’ personal pages. If the flag was valid, the participant gained the corresponding number of points. The participants could both warm up their brains before PHDays 2012 and see some most attractive places of Moscow by means of an interactive map.

The tasks were divided into four categories: Web, Crypto, Reverse, and Social Engineering. 150 participants clashed in a desperate battle, with incredibly persistent struggle for the 1st and the 3rd places. Participants named vos and rdot.org were going head to head for quite a long time fighting for the winning title, and korvin and Antichat were struggling for the last place giving the right to invitations.

As a result the places were distributed as follows:

1st place — rdot.org (5 tickets);

2nd place — shr (3 tickets);

3rd — AVictor (2 tickets).

Moreover, we decided to present all participants who took places from the 4th to 10th with an invitation card. All 10 participants scored the largest number of points will receive gifts from Positive Technologies.

Congratulations to the winners! Hope to meet them at Positive Hack Days 2012.

The battle of the black and white hats in the Hackers vs. Forensics competition developed in a different way. According to the rules, ‘hackers’ were to demonstrate an image of an operating system with an implanted Trojan, developed by them, from May 7 to 15. That Trojan was to provide a remote access to the system. ‘Forensic experts’ had to examine the infected operating system, detect and describe Trojan’s main functions.

‘Hackers’ sent only one image of an infected operating system, but ‘forensic experts’ couldn’t guess, though tried hard, the secrets of the Trojan. In the end the black hats won, and the author of the elusive malware program took all 10 invitation cards to the PHDays 2012 forum. Our congratulations!

For those who are willing to watch the forum, we have specially organized online broadcasting, registration to which is available on the forum’s official website. If you really want to be in the thick of things and take part in PHDays, you are welcome to any hackspace that supports our initiative PHDays Everywhere.