Okay, 2nd post on the website, and it’s about my first ever CTF. Yeah so I just wrapped up my first CTF some time back — the Kaspersky CTF. As traumatizing as it was (more on that later), I genuinely had a lot of fun and I’m hooked on doing more of these. In fact, as I’m writing this, I just got done with another CTF (the TFCCTF), but I only solved one OSINT problem in it ‘cause I’ve got my midterms coming up, which is also why this post is coming up late.
Anyways, quick outcome of the CTF — we finished #10 in India 🇮🇳, and #56 in APAC. (I had to calculate the worldwide ranking myself ‘cause they didn’t give us any, and we finished #124 out of 1622 teams.) Pretty good for my first CTF, tbf.
The Team
Bout my team, bro — huge fucking shoutout to Krish. This guy is seasoned, agreed spontaneously to join the CTF an hour after it started, and carried us through the entirety of crypto, then clutched in the end with the 2 chroot problems, which is why we finished 56th and not like 80th. Also thanks to my other teammates cracka.xss, kuro, and boomboom, who shared the trauma with me and brainstormed and lost their brains just as much as I did.
The Trauma
Coming to the trauma — this was NOT what I expected in a CTF from a company like Kaspersky. There were a lot of “weird” instances, but here’s my fav weird challenges:
1. “Cold Dih” (AI) — The challenge was to get the flag from 3 pigeon chatbots, who, btw, just wanted me to say the lyrics “I phone cold dih, a restaurant part dih…” and some other stuff. I texted them for like 2 hours before I gave up. I am never going to look at pigeons the same way again.
2. SunHua Gate (Pwn) — If the challenge port being 6767 didn’t already make you raise your eyebrows, hold your horses — the program was ENTIRELY in Chinese. Me, kuro, and cracka.xss all lost our minds over SunHua, but well, we weren’t able to get it to work :(
Wrapping Up
I was able to solve 4 out of the 12 challenges our team solved (5 if you count the sanity check), and the writeups will soon be uploaded in the new writeup section I’ll make on the website once I get some time free from my half-yearly prep.
Anyways, see y’all in the next one. EEEEEEEEEEEEE.