It was time for Swedish CTF participants to defeat Surtur the villain. The devil who had sworn to burn Asgard to ashes. The danger threatened all the inhabitants of the city of the gods, and everyone hoped for the conquest of the Knights who fought by the side of Thor. The knights have been trained to keep up with real scenarios while competing to gain Loki’s treasure. In this competition, we witnessed the performance of the best security knights from all over the world. From the USA to Japan, they were all gathered together to defeat Surtur.
Although “klefz” from Sweden, “xryuseix” from Japan, and “ask_boceklri” from Turkey ranked on the first, second, and third place of this CTF respectively, Thor could not defeat the enemy without the help of other participants. All the other participants were wonderful in their unique way and that made the challenge more interesting. Like the “voorivex” team members who rocked the competition at their first experience of CTF, “botim” who represented Austrian knights power, and “official_cyberspace” who proved there is no limitation for white hat hackers.
The joy that the dynamic point system brings to the competition
Imagine if the SecureBug moderators categorized the challenges into three separated levels, hard, medium, and easy and each challenge had its specified static system. Then a participant could earn more scores by only solving a single hard challenge, than other participants who might solve multiple challenges in various categories. Besides, judging about the severity of a CTF challenge occurs based on moderators’ points of view that may differ from how participants evaluate the severity of a challenge. That is why we calculate the scores of participants based on a dynamic system. In a dynamic system, the score of each challenge depends on the number of participants that solve it.
“Tricks 1”, “Discord”, “happy flag” and “Query the flag” were the most solved challenges of this CTF. On the other hand, “insecure authentication” was the hardest challenge of this CTF. As it was so complicated, its score did not decrease from 800 until the end of the competition. Due to its high score, solving it is so game-changing that it could change the rankings. That is the joy that the dynamic point system brings to the competition.
First blood
Thanks to all the contestants, it is important to appreciate those participants of Thor CTF who solved each challenge as the first hunter. Cryptonite was the participant who struck the first blow to the enemy, by solving the “Discord” challenge. They were also the ones who solved “break the logic” as the first hunters. Xzhev was the hunter who solved the “query the flag”, and cslab_sec was the participant who solved “navy encoding”, “CVEmaster”, “hidden in plain sight”, and “precious tritium” for the first time. 1nf1n1ty was the participant who solved two of the hardest challenges of this CTF, “Bait” and “multilingual man” before anyone else. Our champion, Klefz, was the only participant who solved “insecure authentication” and won 800 points.
Our next CTF will be held soon, so be prepared for it. We want you to be the one who fights by our side to defeat Evil.