Hacking at InCTF

Usually I just skim through my NITC mail, and checks only those send by my Class Representative or teachers. One day I read a mail forwarded by one of my seniors Kartik. It was about a hacking competition conducted by Amrita University called InCTF which had 2 preliminary rounds and a final round. It was a Capture The Flag kind of competition. At that time I wasn’t in the mood of doing anything as I had to complete my lab assignments (which I was in a bad situation) and also if by any chance I got selected, the second round will be at the time of our exams so I ignored it. Later when I was searching for some thing I again came across this competition. This was the first time that this kind of an event comes into my notice(It was pretty interesting one… One that I know I will surely enjoy.. :)). Then I called one of my friend to tell him about this. I couldn’t make any decision then as I wanted to put my leg on both the boats - do it and not do it. He was very much excited to do the event. So we decided to meet one of senior for getting the details of the event.

Oh….I forgot to tell, last year(2012) for sCTF, a variant of InCTF, the first prize was bagged by our college team consisting a team of our seniors.

Jerin told us many things : How they prepared, how they participated in the event, about the event format. He also gave us tips on how to attack the questions and also told us the techniques they used in the final CTF round.  We collected their last year’s question paper also. He was very supportive in all ways.

Till date two round of InCTF is completed. First round was a “learning round”. They gave us something like 2-3 months to learn few concepts and complete a question paper. The second round was a hands-on hacking round. It had different varieties of questions and most of which were of very high quality. Thanks to the support of all my friends our team “d3c0dr” got selected into the final round. We finished at 24th position out of 158 teams registered and the end of second round.

It was really great experience in participating in the event. The main thing I have to mention is that I learned few methods and techniques during this event. We also had to stay overnight in our lab during the second round, those were great. Those are the points in your life were you start thinking philosophically and talk like a philosopher. The main reason is that at some point we may be half asleep and wanted to answer to all the questions asked to you. These will be few moments that I will forever keep in my memories.

The more interesting part was that the second round was overlapping our exam time. So we had to it in between the exams. For my last exam I couldn’t even prepare much because I was very much involved in this. After I came back to my room I had a mild fewer also. Everything happened was indicating that I shouldn’t write my exams well(Omen kind of, just saying - I don’t believe in those).

Just excited in participating in the final round… :)