During the weekend of 6-8th of July, our CTF team – Dragon Sector – played in an invite-only competition called WCTF, held in Beijing. The other participants were top-tier groups from around the world (e.g. Shellphish, ESPR, LC↯BC or Tokyo Westerns), and the prize pool of the contest was a stunning $100,000 USD. One particularly unique rule of the CTF was that the challenges were prepared by the teams themselves and not the organizers. Each of the 10 teams was obligated to provide two tasks, at least one of which had to run on Windows. This meant that each team could capture a maximum of 18 flags set up by the other teams in the room. In practice, the structure of the contest incentivized submitting extremely difficult and complex challenges. Remote help was allowed, and the scoring system offered first blood bonus points for being the first, second and third team to solve a task. The hacking part of the event was followed by a soft part, where additional points were granted by a jury and the participants for presenting one’s own tasks on stage.
After two days of though competition, we came out as the runner up of the CTF with 6/18 tasks solved, behind the winner – Tokyo Westerns (7/18 tasks):
Following the