Friday the 19th this April began the NCL team game. This is the final part of the NCL competition, and it has us all working in teams to solve many different cyber problems.
Overall, the general mood of the competition is much better than when we did NCAE on March 9th. NCAE was overly cryptic and used out of date software anyone could break into while you were actively being attacked, NCL provides you with files and web servers to do hands on hacking to find answers to questions.
You are graded on both completion and accuracy. This is to prevent brute forcing answer flags as they all follow the same format.
There are a range of topics to choose from. Hacking into intentionally vulnerable practice sites, deciphering stand in code for malware, gathering info from publicly available data, constructing forensic evidence from various remnants of systems, understanding log files, and even breaking passwords and encryption.
Despite our coach, Professor Joseph Bransfield, being unable to make our Saturday meeting, and between our 2 meetings, all of us only seeing each other very briefly, we carried on virtually over voice chat. Many of us began at 1PM on Friday and didn’t atop until Sunday at 9PM.
It was also a team effort. We covered each other’s weaknesses. For instance, I’m terrible at logs, so my teammate gladly did the logs section while i reverse engineered code and tried to explore a type of vulnerability that allows injecting code into websites. I’m good at forensics and passwords too, so I did that as well.
It was a fun competition, and I look forward to see what’s possible come fall due to many of our team players graduating. It has also gotten several of us wanting to do more CTF competitions over the summer.
We had 9 participants:
- Noah Contardo
- Jarod Zina
- Chris Allen
- Ryan Rosa
- Isaac Dunning
- Edward Walsh
- Brendan Duffy
- Jonathon Hazard
- Ryan Z