capture the Flag the cyber security Olympics for sleep-d deprived nerds Welcome to the wonderful world of Capture the Flag where cyber security professionals and students willingly abandon sleep sanity and social lives to solve puzzles that simulate real cyber attacks but somehow also involve decoding B 64 nested inside Morse code hidden in a JPEG of Shrek CTFs aren't just games They're glorified massochism disguised as learning a combination of logic skill caffeine and the unshakable belief that the flag is definitely in this file somewhere CTF categories aka the seven circles of nerd hell Each CTF challenge falls into a category that determines the flavor of frustration you'll be experiencing for the next 4 to 48 hours Reverse engineering Here's a binary Good luck You open it in Gedra try to make sense of the disassembled nightmare and spend six hours trying to figure out what a suspicious string comparison function is doing only to realize the flag is literally hard-coded in the function You feel smart You feel dumb You feel like Neo staring at the matrix except everything is just poorly written C Web exploitation Here's a web app Find the flag You fire a burpuite find some janky login portal and think easy Three SQL injections two local file inclusions and one broken authentication later you're kneedeep in robots.ext text looking for admin creds that someone left in plain text like it's 1998 And yes someone will say "Try adding a single quote." Cryptography Ah yes The category where you realize your entire understanding of math is a lie You're handed an encrypted message told its simple RSA and spend 2 hours googling modular inverse Python Turns out the key was E= 1 the whole time You could have exorbited with a ham sandwich and cracked it faster Forensics Here's a pecap A memory dump Maybe a zip file with more And maybe there's a wave file with steganography hiding in a corrupted sector of virtual disc image What the hell is even that You'll go full digital archaeologist mode running strings binwok volatility and every tool in Cali like a cyber Indiana Jones Spoiler the flag was in the metadata Binary exploitation Here's a buffer overflow challenge Step one try a repeated a thousand times Step two seg fault Step three GDB intensifies Step four spend four hours crafting a rock chain only to realize NX is off And you could have just used shell code It's like solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded while it's on fire Steganography The image looks normal It's not It's never normal You check the XF data separate RGB channels and eventually discover the flag was in the blue channel of the alpha layer Exord with an MP3 file encoded in Morse code Your eyes are getting a little bit dry Your screen is a Jackson Pollock painting of hex dumps and you're loving every second of it Miscellaneous This is the junk drawer of the CTF world Trivia OENT scripting challenges weird puzzles One moment you're deoffiscating JavaScript the next you're analyzing Twitter profiles to track down a fictional hacker named Root Beer You start to question reality Root bear Team dynamics Organized chaos CTFs are often team- based which means you get one person who knows everything and disappears mid challenge one person stuck on a 50point challenge for eight hours one person doing recon in every challenge like it's a red team hop and one person who just keeps shouting "Try string." Communication is key especially when it's just memes and random screenshots of the challenge bot replying with wrong flag The flag format Every CTF has a flag format Usually something like flag you did the thing or CTF why am I like this And yet you will try flag colon flag semicolon flag square bracket CTF curly bracket flag with a capital L for some reason bracket underscores versus hyphens because the real challenge is submitting the flag in the right format Writeups proof you suffered with style Once the dust settles and the caffeine wears off it's time to write a write up Step one pretend you knew what you were doing the whole time Step two format your commands like a tutorial Step three add pictures to show off your terminal aesthetics Step four secretly Google half the challenge again just to make sure you actually understood it Writeups are both documentation and digital bragging rights If you don't document what you did did you really even do it Online CTF platforms where dreams and sanity go to die There's tons of platforms Try Hackme Hack the Box Pico CTF time Each one brings joy pain and at least one challenge that makes you consider switching careers On-site CTF events CTFs come in an on-site equally chaotic form These are the hacker land parties of legends Defcon the super bowl of CTFs invite only nightmare mode win this and your elite There's also black hat bsides lots of them Wild formats insane difficulties sponsored by many Live events give you the benefit of free t-shirts team bonding and sometimes a bonus CTF plus hangover combo The real prize learning through the pain You don't do CTFs for the prize unless you plan on winning Defcon You do it to learn grow and scream internally as you spend 8 hours chasing a flag that was literally right in front of your eyes in plain text CTFs teach you how attackers think how defenders fail and how creative someone can be with B 64 Exort and Pure Chaos And when it's all over you close your terminal finish your Red Bull and say "I can't wait for the next one." Even though you know better because CTFs aren't just games they're a way of life And also apparently a reliable way to forget what the sun looks like See you on the scoreboard nerds How does it feel if you treat me like you do when you play