SANS Community CTF - November 2020

The end of 2020 was a great time to get into CTFs -- there were so many opportunities to participate! The SANS Institute held two free CTFs nearly back-to-back to end the year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in both. This blog post is about my participation in the very last SANS Community CTF that took place on November 19 & 20, 2020.

The SANS Community CTFs are free events hosted by the SANS Institute on the Tomahawque platform. The only thing you need to do is join the SANS.org community (which I highly recommend even if you don't participate in CTFs because it comes with its own slew of benefits). The specific event in November came with 68 NEW challenges, and there were challenges available for all skill levels, from complete beginner to seasoned pro. In fact, the SANS Community CTF held in October 2020 was my very first CTF ever and the balance of challenges made me feel welcomed and successful, even for a beginner!

The Tomahawque platform is SANS' method of delivering the CTFs to the public. I found it to be one of the most intuitive CTF platforms to navigate. It is delivered in the traditional "Jeopardy-style" format, and you can organize all challenges by type or skill level. I usually go through the challenges by difficulty level. But if you prefer to concentrate on a type of challenge, the Tomahawque platform makes it easy for you to do so. Additionally, as soon as you sign up for a SANS CTF event and have an account on Tomahawque, those events populate automatically and are ready for you as soon as the event begins -- simple!

The type of challenges were very similar to the last one I attended with a few tweaks. The similar feel made me feel less apprehensive this time around which was nice. The only things I observed that were different was the fact that I didn't have to prepend my answers with "Flag{}"; only the flag itself was needed. Another thing that was new, and something I had to consider throughout the event, was that using a Hint would DEDUCT points from my total score! I now now that this practice is usually how it is for many other CTFs, but the previous Community CTF was not so. So it really made me try to tackle the challenges on my own.

So how did I do? See for yourself:

Was I satisfied with my performance? Very much so! Although my rank was lower than my previous event, let me put it into perspective this way:

• Nov 2020: 291st out of 1,690

  • Oct 2020: 184th out of 1,055

• Nov 2020: 5,250 points

  • Oct 2020: 2,750 points

• Nov 2020: Completed 52% of all challenges

  • Oct 2020: Completed 41% of all challenges

So although my rank was not as good, there were more participants this time around, and overall, I did a lot better than my first time around!

If you're reading this and are apprehensive about participating in a CTF because you don't know anything about security. . .be like Nike and just do it! You'll never know how much you'll learn, how much you'll grow on your journey, and how much fun you're going to have!

If you want to keep abreast of all the SANS Institute related CTFs, bookmark this LINK.

I would also recommend that you add https://ctftime.org/ to your bookmarks to keep track of CTFs happening all over the world.

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I created write-ups for all the challenges I successfully completed. Please click the link below to check them out:

SANS COMMUNITY CTF - NOVEMBER 2020 WRITE-UPS