What is a CTF (Capture the Flag) tournament ?
Introduction⌗
Capture the Flag (CTF) is a computer/information security competition where they serve as an educational exercise to give participants experience in securing a machine, as well as conducting and reacting to the sort of attacks found in the real world. It’s a lot similar to competitive programming but in the case of CTFs competitive hacking.
A set of questions will be provided to the contestants/teams based on :
- Cryptography (Cryptanalysis)
- Reverse Engineering
- Binary Exploitation
- Web Exploitation
- Cyber-Forensics
The goal is to Hack! Exploit! Investigate! and capture the flag!
What is a war game ?⌗
In ethical hacking, a war game is a cyber-security challenge and mind sport in which the competitors must exploit or defend a vulnerability in a system or application, or gain or prevent access to a computer system.
A wargame usually involves a capture the flag logic, based on pentesting, semantic URL attacks, knowledge-based authentication, password cracking, reverse engineering of software (mostly JavaScript, Adobe Flash, and assembly language), code injection, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, exploits, IP address spoofing, and other hacking techniques.
Watching my friends play picoCTF 2014 motivated me to play CTFs and I really love it. Playing CTF games will help you improve your coding/hacking skills.
Cheers :)