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 :

  1. Cryptography (Cryptanalysis)
  2. Reverse Engineering
  3. Binary Exploitation
  4. Web Exploitation
  5. 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 :)