Capture the flag 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Capture the flag 2013

ctf365.com

100 pointshamstah53 comments

The apparent trouble with signup notwithstanding, this seems like great fun. The thing is, I didn't find out about those problems, because I didn't even try to sign up. I have no idea how I would go about getting started being able to do this.

Can anybody suggest resources for lowly web developers to make our way into security? Even if just for fun?

I've been reading though Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. So far I'm enjoying it.

Definitely agree. Also highly recommend setting up a Kali or Backtrack box. It's a lot less time consuming than starting your toolkit from scratch.

Thank you. I had not heard of that before and it looks very helpful.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/The-Web-Application-Hackers-Handbook/d...

You should start with http://www.securitytube.net/ also on youtube you'll find very insightful information.

This will be interesting to see when finished, but it would be better if each 'Fortress" had to offer services, instead of dictating that each camp has to run POP + Wordpress + some bullshit plugins. Also, this type of activity definitely will break terms of service for internet service and hosting providers, as well as potentially several laws.

> "...this type of activity definitely will break terms of service for internet service and hosting providers, as well as potentially several laws."

How so? Is the activity itself inherently against TOS or laws? It seems to me that by running the competition, ctf365 intends to have users purposefully exploit sandboxed systems.

I would imagine one example could be a website hosted by a third party. Possibly you would have to inform the host of the situation and get their approval. Otherwise you might be breaking a generic law about gaining unauthorized access to a computer.

See my reply to mjolk. I am under the impression that the "fortress" infrastructure is provided by ctf365.

Ah, I suppose that would cover most bases. If they own the servers and they are giving permission to access them in such a way then there's likely no worries over unauthorized access type laws.

I took a look at this a while back (excited to see it's still going), but there is the chance that your ISP might send you a nastygram/suspend service if they notice a lot of activity that looks like port scanning, though that depends on how intrusive/vigilant your ISP is being.

If ctf365 wanted to keep the playing field level, they could sandbox the entire network so that attacks originate from another device on the network. So you have:

  -----------------Network-----------------------------------
  my_fortress <- targeted by: competitors_command&control_box
  my_command&control_box :targets -> competitors_fortress
  -----------------------------------------------------------

No shady traffic ever needs to traverse the public internet. Only ssh access to my_command&control_box and my_fortress is required. This has the added benefit of normalizing the attacking horsepower of the entrants.

That would limit to some degree the gear that you could bring to the fight. Given that choice of tools in this situation is a valid differentiator I don't think arranging the challenge as "Backtrack5 at Dawn" is a realistic way to go about it. Clearly you could write or upload anything you wished if you sshed in, but the added convenience of BYOD seems like a net win.

We build our own IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and you'll get access through vpn. Building our own IaaS keep us much busy than we thought.

How do you define a 'sandboxed' system? What if I choose to run the Wordpress/Django/Drupal/Whatever-CMS on a shared host? Cracking tools don't often take into account the negative effects on non-target hosts, nor are they generally tolerated by shell providers.

For example, see 'Prohibited Usage' for Linode: https://www.linode.com/tos.cfm

Unless you're paying for raw bandwidth, you're subject to the ToS of each resource provider along the way.

Hmm. I think my confusion comes from the assumption that each "fortress" (server) is a virtual server hosted by ctf365.

From their rules:

Don't try to conduct underground activities with your Fortress (system) from our platform in the Real World (e.g. using our platform to spam others, attack other servers on the internet and so on). We don't care who you are, but we do care what you are doing in our home (CTF365 Platform). Please remember that you are our guest and please behave accordingly.

I read this to imply that they will provide the "fortress". So when I say "sandboxed" system, I mean a system provided by ctf365 on their own infrastructure - infrastructure which permission is implicitly granted to attack.

Yes, we will provide the VPS and more, you'll be able to connect your own hardware as a fortress.

We want to make as few rules as possible. Our scope is to mimic the real world. Still working on the game design and mechanics.

I don't think there is anywhere on the website that explicitly tells you what the objective of this is, nor exactly what a flag is (even if it is more of a concept). As much as I can infer from it, in game instructions, they should be explicit.

Interestingly, they're using the same technique for the cloud effect as that Japanese energy drink site that was posted here not too long ago.

I hope their use of imagery from the Captain America movie is covered under fair use or derivative work.

http://comicbookmarks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/detail-...

Agreed!

The internet is full of information and we've find this 3D Cloud Effect tutorial http://www.clicktorelease.com/blog/how-to-make-clouds-with-c... You should try it too.

Love it. But very janky website makes me worried about the quality.

Yeah, the site seems to leak memory like a sieve. I had to kill -9 firefox.

Also hanging my browser.

It's a good illustration of a misuse of the webapp single-page formula for a simple informational site. This could have been simple HTML with a proper url for each page, so that you could actually link to the subpages, but instead they're trying to load the content in with js, and performing terribly with no feedback on clicks when I last looked.

The actual content is here (and loads pretty quick as it should):

http://ctf365.com/pages/game http://ctf365.com/pages/rules http://ctf365.com/pages/prize

Looks like a rails site, not sure what all the gmaps code is all about, perhaps backend pages?

A fun idea, but I'd prefer if they just specified a simple set of services that you have to support, say something like:

IMAP

Serve this json

Serve this html and let people edit it

Serve this information from any db and let people edit it

and leave the backends to people's imagination. It sounds like they're going to actually specify different CMSs etc, and installing browsers?!?, when they should be specifying what protocols and data are required - that would let you use whatever service and backend tools you wanted.

The maps on the blog look pretty though.

Is there anything to stop me from signing up random people's websites?

Per another branch of the conversation, they set up the servers, you just control them, so the entire conflict happens in a relatively sandboxed environment.

CTF365 It's a Startup on bootstrap mode (self funded) that will change the way Information Security is learned. We try to do our best with very few resources. No seed money, no Kickstarter money but full of passion and dedication.

Tried to sign up and got the same message no matter what email/password I use: " Invalid email or password. "

It worked for me on mobile safari. It's actually a nice sign up process - I was immediately directed to a dashboard.

Oh, btw, for sign up there is no password field. You must be using the sign in form (it could still be a bug, e.g. Clicking sign in shows the sign up form for your browser).

Dad?

An email to support@ctf365.com would help us a lot to make you happy. Thanks!

Anyone interested in making a HN team? (possibly a few given that it's limited members/team)

I'd be interested in joining one if there is space for someone with limited administration experience.

Shoot me an email, brianw.stearns@gmail.com. I have [very] limited practical admin experience, but I will try to scare up a friend who can devote some time to it.

Mobile browser fail

Edit: The signup/signin box is half off to the left of the screen.

This is cool. Please hammer home the C&C nostalgia - we all love it.

Looks like they got too much traffic...

Really hard to read the text, but really nice homepage.

How is that possible? What's the purpose of the homepage?

wish I knew anything about hacking to play this, just know development :( setting up the server would be some work to me already

Hopefully they'll at least link to good configuration sites for each service, to give new players at least a fighting chance.

I wonder how long it would take someone to spin up a script to install all of these services...

SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, etc., one CMS + specific plugins, 2 different internet browsers, 3 web applications & at least 2 different databases

So...a mail server, file servers, multi-webhost, databases, and CMS with many plugins. I assume that "different databases" means different database stacks on different clusters, not "both MySQL and SQL Server 2012" on the same server, right? (In Windowsville this would all be within an AD domain, I'm not sure what the Linux equivalent is.) Will there be a required volume of photo/social datamass to be stored on the server? Maybe instead of some kind of "flag file", we'll have to store embarrassing photos of ourselves?

Who installs a second browser on a server?

curl and wget, right?

Who installs a first browser on a server?

1. They come preinstalled on some closed-source OSes

2. How else would you connect to a datacenter server's integrated lights out (ILO) webpage from a bastion server within the datacenter and domain, to which you're only allowed an RDP connection?

Of course, this introduces a meta-game where script writers can include their own malicious code. :)

It might be a great learning opportunity then. Check out some tutorials and see what sort of security considerations go into setting up and running a server.

sure I'd love to, but I wonder how do you guys keep up, I feel pretty swamped in news, own projects(maintaining 1, like 4 or 5 to start) and work :/

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