Team flagbot finishes DEFCON Capture the Flag contest as best European team
For the first time, ETH Zürich’s CTF team flagbot qualified for the prestigious DEFCON CTF competition. Our joint participation with EPFL students was a big success. Not only did we make it into the top 10, we also finished as the best European team.
In August 2021, our CTF team flagbot from ETH Zurich participated in the DEFCON CTF, a prestigious cyber-security competition in Las Vegas. Joining forces with the EPFL team polygl0ts proved to be a huge success. Especially since the introduction of the master’s programme in Cyber Security, a cooperation of ETH Zurich and EPFL, it seemed logical to compete together. The joint team organizers is lead by myself, Leonardo Galli. I am a student at ETH Zurich. At DEFCON 20 flabgot members played on site in Las Vegas whereas another fifteen students supported our team remotely from Lausanne.
Even before the start of the competition, we got to prove our ingenuity by fixing the poor internet speed in the hotel. Thanks to an overcomplicated networking setup – three phones taped to the bathroom wall (the location providing the best reception), all connected via Ethernet to a Wi-Fi router that load-balanced between the phones – we were able to remedy the situation. It proved quite hard to go to the bathroom without tripping over an Ethernet cable, so it had to be declared as off-limits for lavatorial usage.
In our team, each member specialised in different areas of hacking. The challenges we had to overcome ranged from shellcoding, reverse engineering, and hypervisor escaping to common vulnerability exploitation in an attack/defense competition where they had to simultaneously attack other teams and defend our systems against exploits by our competitors.
Would you like to join our team?
flagbot, the CTF team of ETH, is open to both complete newcomers and experienced players. You can find more information about us here external pagehttps://flagbot.ch.
