PHDays III CTF: Levart D’Errorim

The Positive Hack Days forum, which was held on May 23 and 24, traditionally hosted a CTF contest. During two days, ten teams from six countries beat back attacks and hacked rivals' networks.

Plot

To add a special appeal to the contest, the PHDays CTF organizers created a legend according to which the plot line and game infrastructure were prepared. The PHDays III CTF legend ran as follows: the teams were to save the poor people of D’Errorim from horrid monsters that would knock down every living thing.

Visualization

The audience often notes that CTF contests are not entertaining. In order to turn the PHDays CTF into the most spectacular hacking contest, many efforts has been taken by the organizers for creating visualization. Due to their efforts iPhone and Android apps were developed. By installing the application, anyone could watch the battle on his or her phone display.

In addition, a web visualization was available on the PHDays site.

Tasks

The conditions of the CTF contest are as close to real life as possible, although it has a tinge of magic. During the tasks creating, the Positive Technologies experts’ practical experience in detecting security issues was used, that's why many vulnerabilities of the game infrastructure can occur in real life as well.

Anyways, the participants were to show not only their hacking skills to win the contest. On of the PHDays III CTF tasks was the Labyrinth: the participants needed to get over the laser field and motion detectors, open secret doors, clear the room of bugs, combat with artificial intelligence and render a bomb harmless.

Another test for the partakers was to solve the Competitive Intelligence task.

Winners

The contest was really fierce. During two days of the forum, different teams enjoyed the leading place at various times, among them were ufologists, PPP, RAON_ASRT, Eindbazen and More Smoked Leet Chicken.

Eindbazen became the winner. PPP, a US team that won PHDays CTF 2011, took second place, and More Smoked Leet Chicken, the last year's champion, a Russian team, came third. The winners were awarded with cases with money inside as a prize.

2drunk2hack

After the CTF contest, the teams could finally relax and take part in 2drunk2hack. Vladimir Vorontsov (ONSec), a repeated champion of the contest, conceded the championship to geohot, a well-known hacker from the PPP team.

The winner celebrated the victory performing a freestyle song in a Moscow bar.

That's all for today! We're going to make the next year's PHDays CTF more fascinating and it will left no indifferent.