International Capture the flag Competition 2006
December 8th, 2006. Georgia Tech's Capture the Flag Team in Top Five, took 2nd in the U.S and 5th overall for 25 teams spread across the globe.
Each December, the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) hosts the International Capture the Flag (also known as the iCTF), a global Internet hacking competition. Unlike other attack/defend contests, this competition comprises a global VPN infrastructure connecting 25 universities, on four continents. The goal of this competition is to bring diverse students together, test their Internet attack/defend skills, and build international camaraderie.
During this 9 hour tournament, a vulnerable server image is released and hosted at each competitor's site. This year's image, containing a number of vulnerable services, comprised a fictitious online banking system. The goal of each team was to protect their bank by hardening their services, and to increase their assets by hacking into other competitors banks and stealing money. Points were awarded for both fending off attacks as well for stealing cash.
Common applications and appliances used in this competition include, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), firewalls, sniffers, scanners, as well as log analysis, static and dynamic code analysis of binaries and source code, log analysis, scripting, and common network administration.
Int80, Georgia Tech's iCTF team, is comprised of a talented group of graduate and undergraduate students from the College of Computing and the School Electrical and Computer Engineering. This year's success, rating in the top 5 worldwide, is the culminations of two months of testing and training. Final results can be viewed at: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF/final_results.html Movies of the international competitors is available at: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF/iCTF_UCSB_2006.mov.
Sponsors and assistance were provided by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC), IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS), SPI Dynamics, and TSO.