VolgaCTF: summarizing the first round

    March 25-27, the correspondence round of the team competition in information security VolgaCTF 2016 was held. And today we publish the results.

    image

    This year, the championship was held under the banner of the struggle for free software: participants were asked to find information on the GAI artificial intelligence developed by enthusiastic scientists. The greedy corporation, which created its commercial alternative to BAI, tried to hide all the traces of a free competitor, but there it was! Traces could be found by solving tasks that this year were laid out in a random order, and not by increasing the number of points, as before.

    To communicate with the organizers and inter-team chat, a bot was launched in Telegram, which many participants, by the way, mistook for their personal guardian angel, filling it with “answer” and “flag” messages. Some, it seems, tried to persuade the bot by sending such messages again and again.

    Some dry statistics: in the previous article ( habrahabr.ru/post/280043 ) we showed that the number of participants is growing every year. This year lived up to expectations - the total number of registered teams increased to 749, of which 668 confirmed their participation. 452 participating teams tried to solve tasks by sending responses to the server. 199 of them finished the competition with a non-zero result.

    image

    The maximum number of points for tasks is 6,260. On average (or rather, the median), teams scored 600 or more points. Above this figure 102 teams rose. In general, points are distributed from 10 (the minimum number of points awarded for the Qiuz task) to 4860 (with this amount the leaders of the correspondence stage finished). The second diagram shows that a rather large number of teams (49 is a quarter of the “productive” teams) solved one or two serious tasks and stopped at that.

    image

    It is interesting to look at the geographical distribution of the participants (the information was taken from the registration data and from the profiles of the teams on the website ctftime.org). By the number of participants, the first place is predictably occupied by Russia (165 teams). 108 teams have identified themselves as “international”. There are also many teams from the USA, Japan, South Korea.
    There are also unexpected countries, for example, Mongolia (5 teams), North Korea (2 teams). The Micronesian team, however, upon closer examination turned out to be Iran. (A small offtopic: when writing this fragment, the author came up with the idea to consider and analyze the geography of participants in world CTF competitions. It is very unusual to see a dozen teams from the seemingly not very distinguished achievements in Vietnam’s IT sphere. If any of the readers have their own thoughts on this topic, share them in the comments)

    image

    The first places in the qualifying round were taken by experienced teams, CTF veterans. The three finalists look like this:
    1) First place - dcua (Ukraine), 4860 points.
    2) EpicFairPlay, they are also SUSlo.PAS (Russia), 4810 points
    3) Bushwhackers (Russia), 4610 points.
    Of the latest names, Destructive Voice (10th place) and the HETTO team (6th place), which previously participated in only a few competitions, can be noted. The twelfth team in the list of finalists, int3pids from Spain, scored 3400 points.

    According to preliminary information, 5 Volga teams (Samara, Saratov, Penza), 4 teams from other regions (from Novosibirsk, Moscow, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg) and 3 foreign teams (from the USA and Ukraine) will take part in the face-to-face tour.
    It was exciting to watch the progress of the competition, we thank all the participants! Detailed solutions to tasks may be published on Habré or the official website, but for now, curious people can look at solutions from teams at ctftime.org/event/279/tasks . See you in the final round!

    Also popular now: