dCTF 2021: My First CTF

This was my first live CTF. The individual challenge writeups are still in the original repository:

UlyssesSaicha/dCTF2021_Writeup

I found the event on CTFTime. It was aimed at beginners, and since I had never played a live CTF before, I figured it was a good place to start.

I set aside the whole weekend and joined as soon as the CTF went live. There were some connection issues, but aside from that, the start was smooth.

I began in a solo team, then quickly found three people to team up with:

TobjasR#3519
Edward#5238
gogo#1923

The team name ended up being:

dCTF team name screenshot — The team name. It gave me a good giggle.

I ended up contributing most of the points:

dCTF score contribution screenshot — Score contribution during the event.

The team breakdown looked like this:

dCTF team breakdown screenshot — The team breakdown. I still do not know who was trying to input every flag.

Why so many failed submissions? Probably someone on the team raged a bit.

We did not talk much apart from the first and final days. The main issue was that Gogo and Edward did not have good microphones, so they were almost impossible to understand.

Competing with people you have never talked to before is difficult. That was probably the biggest lesson outside of the challenges themselves.

Saturday

The second day of the event was rough. I barely played apart from one or two challenges.

I woke up with my back killing me and could not stay in any position for more than about 15 seconds before it started hurting again.

Sorry, team.

Search trail

Google My Activity lets you see your search history and filter it by date:

Google My Activity

I extracted the data from the site and cleaned it up:

Cleaned Google activity search data screenshot — The cleaned search activity for the CTF weekend.

That came out to 434 searches for the weekend.

I did not do much else other than watch a few Twitch streams, so that was probably close to the full CTF search trail.

I also visited 483 pages:

Google activity page visit count screenshot — Page visit count from the same weekend.

A side discovery

In one challenge, we were given this image, fri.png:

fri.png challenge image — The challenge image that sent me down a small reverse-image-search trail.

I could not figure it out, so I tried a reverse image search and found a blog post from what I believe was one of the CTF admins:

Informativni dnevi

Reverse image search related result screenshot — It had nothing to do with the solution, but I thought it was interesting.

Notes

The writeups I published are the challenges I completed and found interesting enough to write about. Some challenges are missing, and there were many others I did not complete.