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Comment by ilkhd2 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but the way the article is presented... Feels like it is written by Scr33p7 K1ddi3.

I'm not a script kiddie, I'm a grad student in security. I did, however, bang out that article in one go after only partially recovering from the 50+-hour contest, so it's not the most coherent.

You may think it sounds like its written by a script kiddie, but he solved one of the most difficult challenges in the game and did all of this in only a few hours -- likely on little to no sleep.

Half of the competition requires exploitation of network services. This year included x86, x86-64, sparc64, ppc, compiled python, a java interpreter statically linked into a x86 binary, among a bunch of other random ones. You can't be a script kiddie and do well in this competition.

Actually, I had just woken up from sleeping ~8 hours about 3-4 hours before the question was released, and we didn't do any of the exploitation of networked services except Pwtent Pwnables 200 (compiled Python) and Binary L33tness 100 and 200 (trivial patches in a debugger). I was tired by the time the rest came out, and the other reversers on the team burned themselves out on the PP400 (the PPC question) and Binary L33tness 300 (a huge red herring that actually printed the answer, encoded in hex when it was run). Thanks for defending me, though.

That's because the kiddies had to learn chaos text from us in order to read .nfo files and the like.

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