CTFs are Fun

#mlh #security

For the first time in my life I am actively participating in a CTF contest.

What are CTFs?

CTF stands for "Capture the Flag". This is a contest where competitors exploit security vulnerabilities in software to get flags which is usually a text string of known format.

MLH CTF Experience

I am currently the head of a team at the CTF contest as part of the MLH Fellowship. I will talk about that in another post 😉.

While being a complete beginner at cybersecurity, there were easy to hard challenges in this contest. This has really helped me learn so much in just a week. It quite amazing!

Some Awesome Tools

I have learnt how to use tools like nslookup which is a dns lookup tool, nmap, a network scanner to discover open ports and services while breaking into "boxes" which are linux machines.
I also found John the Ripper while trying to crack the passphrase for a pgp key. I ended up not needing this though. The password I was looking for was right in the first lines of rockyou.txt.

While this is the first time I am actually able to contribute to a CTF challenge, I have actually been in one before. This was 2 years ago during my internship at Goldman Sachs. I got as far as opening Chrome's developer console and that was it. I must have really improved in these 2 years.

Let's see if I come out top 10 😄