DEF CON "Capture the Capture The Flag" Data

pablos writes "Each year DEF CON hosts the famed Capture The Flag contest. Hackers from all over the world duke it out on the network for 72 hours, hacking for the title. The Shmoo Group diligently logs every packet for posterity, we "Capture the Capture The Flag." Now is your chance to download by far the most interesting, 'sploit ridden, 5.8GB of intrusion collusion ever published. Free for the bandwidth endowed, this is the ultimate IDS testbed."

They cheated us.

[vulgarDPS]

At defcon 8 DPS was at defcon and Burrows straight up social engineered his way into the server room and rooted the main box. So technically we had just won but they disqualified him cuase they wouldn't acknowledge social engineering as valid. Before defcon 8 DPS (dead [protocol] society) had pretty much dominated the social engineering contests but defcon 8 was the first year they decided to stop doing the social engineering contests so we were forced to improvise.

Bandwidth Cost

[JohnHegarty]

How are they going to pay for the bandwidth cos on this...if evan just 1000 people download it (and it has been slashdotted) then it will 5.8 Terabytes of information to be downloaded.

This won't exaclty be payed for by a banner ad.

n-ctf sucked this year, I hear...

[Gainax]

from what I hear, n-ctf SUCKED this year...

From a friend whom was on one of the teams:

We set up some 'reflectors', using the MIRROR target of the Linux netfilter and almost got booted of the net by the judges for this unique solution.

Bleh.

CTF Rules

[Rizz0]

The rules for CTF at DC9 were, unfortunately, not well tested prior to the actual event. The intent of the rules were to provide more targets to attack, by shifting the burden of providing targets to the competitors. However, with the rules as written at the beginning of the contest, it turned out to be (pointwise) not worth attempting to hack. The net effect of the rules were that most groups were simply putting up a server, getting the points and pulling it down. While this is a valid strategy for that ruleset, it doesn't make for much of a hacking competition. This constant churning of servers also made hacking difficult, with targets disappearing by the time you could identify them through the standard CTF network instability.

We (the GhettoHackers, with the much appreciated help of Jennifer Grannick) managed to slowly, over the course of the competition, convince Miles to change the rules to a set more conductive to an actual hacking competition. When teams began merging due to the rule changes, we merged with Digital Revelation, to both group's benefit. We gained their server points, and they gained our capture points.

Besides winning CTF, the GhettoHackers / Digital Revelation team also had the highest average Blood Alcohol Level of any group (check out http://cow.pasture.com/~tcroc for more details). As announced at the awards ceremony, we, the GhettoHackers, have retired from CTF after DC9. To help foster more competiton, and for a different application of our expertise, the GhettoHackers will be helping to run CTF at DC10.