MSU CTF Spring 09 Final Wrap-up
I let the law enforcement class go on break briefly this morning so that I could be there to witness the end of this semester’s Capture The Flag competition. In the tradition I began last year, playing “Eye of the Tiger” during the last moments of the competition, Chris loaded up “The Final Countdown”. This [...]
CTF Sunday Update: Lazy Sunday Hacking
Everyone still has the itus from the food and festivities yesterday, so things are moving a little bit slow in the lab today. There was only one pen-tester-in-training in there when I just checked, but it was obvious that others had been through, judging from the food wrappers in the garbage. This is how hackers [...]
CTF Saturday Evening: Super Bulldog Weekend Shut-ins
While everyone else is out partaking in food and fun at MSU’s Super Bulldog Weekend, Old Main Music Festival, and Cotton District Arts Festival this weekend, the true alpha-security-nerds are living it up in the lab. On my way over to the music festival, I have stopped by the lab to see how the teams [...]
CTF Friday Morning: The Ballad of Team Firewall
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 [...]
Spring 2010 MSU Capture the Flag
Today, immediately after my rules lecture to the 9:30AM (Central) information security class, the Spring 2010 iteration of Capture the Flag here at Mississippi State University will begin. While I have handed off much of the responsibility for running CTF to Chris Vance, our Security Lab Administrator, I will still be covering the event on [...]
Interesting Reading, and Red Team Action
I’ve been busy this week teaching part of the intro series of courses we have at the National Forensics Training Center, but I still wanted to post a quick update. I figured I’d share a few interesting things I read this week, and talk a bit about some extracurricular activities going on in our lab [...]
Capture the Flag: Final Scores – Ring 0 Wins!
Ring 0 pulled it off in the end, with VM to VM flag submission to prevent their own flags from going out on the wire, thwarting the McGrewchebag’s attempts at automated sniffing/resubmission. They were here all night hacking away and their devotion paid off. I expected to find them face-down on the keyboard when I [...]
CTF Weekend Update: Sunday 2:30 PM
The lab has been very busy this weekend. Yesterday at 3PM I received an email asking me to drop by and reboot the VMs due to sluggish performance, and I expected a handful of people in here when I arrived. When I got to the lab, I was very surprised to see a little over [...]
CTF Update: Friday 5:00 PM
After a very busy morning, the number of students in the lab hacking away at CTF went down in number, but up in rowdiness. There are three close “top” teams now, with “Where’s Jerry?” (formerly known as Team 4, name in reference to a missing member) joining McGrewchebags and Ring 0 in being very active. [...]
CTF Update: Friday Morning
Activity has seriously picked up after this morning’s brief class meeting. I discussed the events of my previous updates with them, clarified some rules, talked about useful tools, and gave a brief ramble on ways to effectively keep Wireshark from overwhelming them with data (or from crashing). Members of the previously less active teams are [...]