The meta-game of sniffing and counter-sniffing on our CTF normally makes teams paranoid about submitting flags early in the game. This paranoia even outweighs the main benefit of submitting early: ties are broken by the time of last submission. At this point in the game scores are normally low.
This is not a normal instance of CTF, though. One team, Team Firewall has embraced the risks and run up their score early. As of this morning at 8:15 AM, the scores are as follows:
- Team Firewall – 24 points
- Team Wireshark – 3 points
- Team Sniffer – 1
- Team Burp Suite – 1
- Team Nmap – 0
- Team Tracker – 0
This year, initial team names were chosen by the security class’ professor, Dr. Ray Vaughn. The names don’t reflect any association with the listed open-source projects (though if the members want to work out endorsement deals, they are welcome to!).
In true nerd fashion, we’ll see how much activity we have in CTF over the weekend with the university’s Super Bulldog Weekend festivities going on.
I wonder if Team Firewall was trying to rush the field before anyone got their sniffers up and running? If they were successful that was a great strategy.