On 15 Oct 2013, our team of Dystopian Knights (Nikolas, Wei Lin and Jia Hao) boarded a coach for the five and a half hour journey to Kuala Lumpur. Their objective? To take part in the annual Hack-In-The-Box (HITB) Capture-The-Flag competition held on 16 and 17 Oct at the Hotel InterContinental. This will give them the opportunity to pit their skills against international teams from countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, with some of the teams comprising of infocomm security professionals.
The competition theme this year was “War of the World” with each team defending a “country” and trying to launch attacks against rival countries. The competition organisers also threw in side challenges to keep teams on their toes.
“The challenges were pretty challenging, and we had to crack our heads to figure out how to progress in the competition.” – Jia Hao
“This year's CTF was definitely challenging, especially compared to other competitions held locally in Singapore. The difference being the fact that this competition focused more on lower level challenges, requiring reverse engineering skills.” – Nikolas
“The CTF was pretty tough, as it consisted of challenges requiring lots of reversing. Besides the main challenges, there were also side challenges that require knowledge such as analysing of pcap files, detecting steganography and recovering hidden files and well, even more reversing!” – Wei Lin
Despite the difficulty level, the Dystopian Knights managed to solve several puzzles and challenges, constantly hovering between the fourth, fifth and sixth positions throughout the competition before finally finishing at a good fifth position.
Besides the CTF competition, there was also the CommSec Village, an exhibition area showcasing various security related projects from both open source and commercial organisations.
So how did the team feel about their days spent in Kuala Lumpur?
“The competition allowed me to push myself to my limits and as a result, I improved in various areas of technical skills. In addition, the exposure to many various types of challenges also widened my extent of general knowledge which would prove useful for future CTFs. It also served as an effective platform to interact with professionals in the field and learn from them” – Nikolas
What else did they enjoy about the trip?
“Being able to see the Petronas Twin Towers when I just look out of the hotel windows! As well as the delicious food in KL ! :) ”
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