MetaCTF CyberGames 2020 was a Jeopardy style capture the flag event that ran from October 24 - 25, 2020. I signed up for this event as an individual. But much like what happened with the NSA Codebreaker Challenge, I ended up being admitted to WGU, joined the Cybersecurity Club, and formed an impromptu team within 24 hours of the event starting!
This CTF covered topics including:
Binary Exploitation
Cryptography
Forensics
Reconnaissance
Reverse Engineering
Other
The format of the challenges was clean and organized:
I loved how you could parse the topics of the challenges by clicking any of the tabs at the top. There was also quick access to Bonus challenges, Help in case you ran into any problems, UI settings to change things up to your preference, and even a link to CyberChef!!!
I was able to flex my collaborative muscles again working with a team of three other WGU Cybersecurity students. We utilized our Cybersecurity Club's Discord server to bounce ideas back and forth, and it is nice to see things organically work themselves out as each of us have our strengths and weaknesses. Communication was definitely key because a lot of time could be wasted if we didn't organize what challenges each person would work on. Early on, when the challenges were easy, a couple of us were eager to hit the ground running and I noticed that I spent time solving a challenge, then I would go to enter my "Flag" and would find that the challenge was closed out because it was already solved by one of my teammates. It didn't take long for us to work it all out.
My team participated whenever we could throughout the two day event. Some of us had jobs, some of us were remote at home with family, working on certifications, and working on university classes. I think we still fared well overall ranking #319 out of nearly 1000 teams that actually put points on the board.
The Scoreboard even gave a cool statistical webpage that shows the completed challenges by specific skill:
I'm built in a way where I want to learn anything and everything I can, so it was a challenge for me working as a team in this CTF event knowing that there were challenges I wouldn't even attempt because I had a teammate working on it. But one of the BEST parts of this CTF is the fact that the challenges are still open to learn from, even weeks after the event ended! This allows me to go back and try the challenges that were assigned to other teammates, and also to take a crack at the more difficult ones that we didn't even touch during the two day event.
Below is the link to the challenge write-ups that I was assigned to. I had fun with these challenges, and it was a very organized and well-run event. I even forgot to mention that they had everything going on at once: they had presentations from John Hammond and the great people at Black Hills Information Security; they had live chats in their Discord server; and the MetaCTF team was streaming Live on YouTube nearly the entire time of the event. I would definitely do this event again!
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