About the Hackers Challenge Contest
The Hackers Challenge contest is an event held annually during the SAINTCON conference to challenge your skills as a security professional by presenting players with technology, logical, and security related puzzles and challenges.
Roughly defined, the Hackers Challenge contest is a Jeopardy-like progressive game where players are presented with puzzles that require various security and technical skills to solve. Attendees work on these challenges and submit keys collected from solving them in order to earn points. The person with the highest score at the end of the contest wins.
Let the PRECON games begin!
For a little warmup practice, fun, and entertainment start your adventures at:
CONTEST SUPPORT
If you need help completing a challenge ask for assistance on the #HackersChallenge channel in Slack.
CATEGORIES
The following categories may be featured in the Hackers Challenge Contest this year:
- Binary L33tn355 (understanding file formats)
- Capture the Packet (networks and PCAPs)
- Crypto Madness (cryptography)
- Forensic Analysis
- Pursuits Trivial (random trivia)
- Potent Pwnables (get root)
- gnireenignE esreveR (reverse engineering)
- noob sauce (beginner level puzzles)
- Ridiculous RegEx (regular expressions puzzles)
- SE/OSINT (social engineering)
- Spiders Web (web application security)
CONTEST RULES
For me details on scoring and gameplay please see the gameserver.
The rules for the Hackers Challenge are loosly defined, but strictly include the following:
- Play the game ethically
- Do NOT share captured flags
- You may work together as a team, but there can only be one winner
- Do NOT brute force the scoring server. NO Challenge requires brute forcing the infrastructure
- Do NOT steal flags by compromising other players
DISCLOSURES
The SAINTCON Hacker's Challenge admins reserve the right to disqualify and/or change scores for participants who violate the game rules or participate in unprofessional conduct. We reserve this right without right of dispute or for any other reason we feel is appropriate or prudent.
Also be warned: We have ways of monitoring cheating, sharing of flags, and other shenanigans that might go on. Get away with it... Good for you! Get caught, your score will suffer.