Our continuous endeavor to extend the reach of our favorite forum "reboot" has brought forth one more section - "Team Reboot". The title of this forum finds its resemblance with this topic posted earlier. So, everyone who has come across the said thread can take a guess what this team can be dealing with. You'll be glad to know that on 7th July, 2011, a six member team consisting of Nuno Brito, pscEx, Mikorist, florin91, Agni & Holmes.Sherlock took part in an eight hours' challenge named dCTF 2011 which was held as a part of eighth conference on DIMVA 2011 (Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment). Though their website describes it to be a intrusion detection, malware detection, and vulnerability assessment competition which'll require the participants to defend their own systems & attack as well as others, I personally find this year's contest to be packed up with non-hacking-type thought provoking materials.
dCTF 2011 was played within a VPN, the configuration files of which were distributed to the teams few days prior to the contest. An encrypted VirtualBox image of an OS was also provided for download. The decryption key was made available at the very first minute of the contest on the IRC channel & mailing list. Previously in dCTF, contestants were judged by the amount of time they could keep an OS image with some vulnerable services running & by bringing down the same of their rivals. This year, they deviated from the pattern & we found that the OS image, which happened to be an image of Minix, was only useful for describing the theme of the contest & giving out some useful information. The story goes like this - there was a hyper-intelligent robot called Messy, which probably turned out to be violating some robotic laws (I'm not sure myself!!!) & needed to be brought down. And here comes the real challenge. The parts of Messy's subsystems were scattered across different servers within the VPN. Those were, in turn, a bunch of cryptographic problems, some might be on reverse engineering, a few were playing with some file format related tricks etc. Some code based 9e.g. PHP, HTML) vulnerability detection challenges were also there. Upon solving of one stage, the door to next step opens. A few screenshots of the contest environment are attached to give you a better feel of how things looked like. Those who have been interested by this time to know can have a look at this to know how the contest was held in previous years. You'll find the pattern to be completely different & innovative. But, the common thread that binds all of them together is that they were all security related challenges ('Hacking' is really a nasty term to be used as it sometimes arises some ethical & legal concerns).
The sad part is, in spite of our earnest efforts, our team couldn't cut a good figure in the competition. From then on we realized that though reboot has a number of booting specialist today, we are not in pace with the unexplored world of security, intrusion detection & malware analysis. World is moving on. Why we people stay back? This motivated us to form a "Team Reboot' which'll have a dual aim of keeping an eye on aforementioned stuffs, as well as selecting & choosing a few from us & get ourselves well-prepared to take part in dCTF 2012 & similar contests. Both the aims of paramount importance & to make it a success, we need active co-operation, suggestion, feedback, "positive" criticism & active interaction from all of our members.
This is enough for today, I guess
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