Introduction

Welcome to Capture The Flag.

What This Is

• A hacking contest
• A chance to witness the nature of real cyber incident response
• An opportunity to show off your 1337 skillz

What This Is Not

• A LAN party
• A chance to talk up how great you think you are
• An opportunity to show off your sweet gaming rig

Rules

Important Rules

• The contest network is 10.x.x.x. Do not attack machines outside the contest network. All federal, state, and school laws still apply to the outside network.
• If the "outside network" requires you to plug into a different switch, do not connect any machine that has been on the contest network.
• Consider this network hostile: your machine may be compromised.
• We expect you to be disruptive within the framework of the game (malicious code, network scanning, social engineering, etc.). Disruptive behavior outside the game will result in a public and humiliating ejection from the contest area.

Less-Important Rules

• If IRC is up, you should use it to communicate with the contest staff. Staff will have operator status in #ctf.
• If you think something is wrong with the game, you are expected to demonstrate the problem and explain what you think is the correct behavior.

Scoring

The contest is made up of multiple categories. Each category is worth one point toward the total score; the percentage of the total points held by your team is the percentage of one point your team has for that category. The team that has 30% of the points in each of five categories has 1.5 points, whereas the team that has 80% of the points in only one category has 0.8 points.

There are two kinds of categories: flags, and puzzles.

Flags

Flag categories are challenges with a notion of a winner or service availability. In these categories, the flag-holder (the winner, or each team with a running service) makes 1 point per minute for as long as they hold the flag. If there is a single flag-holder, and the flag changes hands, a point is awarded to the new winner at the moment the flag moves.

Puzzles

Most of the categories come in the form of multiple puzzles: for each puzzle presented, a key (answer) must be found to recieve the amount of points that puzzle is worth. Any team may answer any puzzle question at any time. A new puzzle is revealed when a team correctly answers the highest-valued puzzle in that category.

Hints

If you are really stuck, you can ask for a hint. It will cost you points, though. For puzzles, you will lose ¼ of the points for that puzzle even if you never solve the puzzle. For other events, the staff member will decide how many points it will cost. You can try to bribe or otherwise fanagle information out of us or other contestants. It's a hacking contest.

About Us

We are the dirtbags. People pay us money to do the sorts of things you'll be doing in this contest.