aCTF3 - "King of the Hill"
Yes, it's official; we'll back again this year. The first year, nobody scored, the wifi network we set up had massive problems, but people seemed to have a little fun and see the potential. Last year, the network was stable, people scored, battled back and forth, and we were actually able to give out some prizes. There was some trouble with boxes staying up, but overall it was a huge success.
Last year we saw some things that surprised us. There was a case of two teams which both could take a flag, but neither could lock the other out. They both then proceeded to write scripts to play the game for them. Yeah, it then made the server inaccessible due to the massive amounts of requests, but still... hats off to both of you. We didn't expect automated hacking. We also learned that while Windows NT might have worked in our little test environment, it really can't hold up to the brutality of a Defcon contest. I'm happy to say that Windows NT will not be appearing in this year's contest.
We will be changing a few things around this year, but the basics will be the same as before. Find a flag, find a way to put your team name on it, and you'll score points for as long as you can keep your flag up there.
As usual, details on the contest will be limited, however we will say that we're branching out a bit more this year. Hacking isn't just about buffer overflows and running metasploit, it's really about one upping someone (or everyone) else. It's about figuring out how things work and taking them apart and putting them back together to do something different, customizing things to make them do things they were never intended to do, and just generally learning how to beat the system.