2016 Backdoor CTF Recap

This past Saturday teamOops participated in Backdoor 2016. This being the teams second CTF together we decided to do somethings a little differently this time and we also brought on a new member. Even with these additions I was not really to fond of this event. The first couple hours were pretty rough, the event seemed to not be completely ready for the start and the site was having issues handling the load (understandable but you know how many people are signed up you should be ready). Not only those small issues the event released challenges over the course of the day and not all at once which I was not a huge fan of and I am not entirely sure if this is something normal or just something Backdoor does.

I am sure most of you do not care about this and want to know about the challenges. I spent most of the time since sCTF preparing for pwn and re challenges and I was proficent with the ones hosted on Backdoor site. I looked through previous challenges from other years and they all seemed to be mainly pwn and re based which made me very excited. However, once we read through the initial challenges I was not so lucky, this event was mostly crypto and web oriented which most of teamOops, especially myself are behind in. After the initial disappointment we started chugging away at the problems and were able to solve a couple of the initial problems and grabbed three more throughout the event. I do not want to give credit to just one person but just like in sports we all have a good night and one of my teammates had a really good night and was able to grab all but one of the flags we grabbed. I was lucky enough to grab the other one which a write up will be written for. We all worked together so he does not deserve all the credit but a large chunk of it. This pretty much raps up my thoughts on the event I will end with saying I was not entirely impressed how the admins handled the criticism but overal the event was not a complete failure.

Incase you are wondering teamOops ended up finishing is 53 out the 400 teams that signed up which is a great finish for a n00b team imo.