I have participated in VishwaCTF’24 which is held from 1st of March to 3rd of March. I leave lessons that I learned from this event.
Actually, it was my first time to participate in a CTF event. I didn’t know that it’s ok to team up with other people to solve questions. So, I participated by myself and I noticed why it is suggested to join the event as a team 🙁 (Not bad that I ranked at 383 among 1690 teams though).
Also, There was one thing that I missed. It was sad when I noticed that I missed a feedback survey which gives me free 100 points. I was concentrating hard on a web based question. I will never miss a free point next time.
Anyways, I learned several points from the event, so I will share those here.
- Although the event continues in the course of 3 days, it is difficult to deal with all the questions. There were many types of questions such as web, cryptography, steganography, OSINT etc.. I was only able to solve web based questions and some of OSINT questions with my current knowledge. Other questions were out of my capability. And each question requires quite a long time to get a hidden flag. I realized that other people team up and divide their roles based on their experience and strength. For example, one member only focuses on web related questions and another member marks cryptography questions like that.
Therefore, lesson one is to team up with other people. - It was hard to collect any information from the official discord channel. I assume this is because people are participating as a team. So they could discuss within the team. However, individual players like me had difficulty sharing and getting meaningful information or hints. Everyone is asking and few people answer the questions. This is another reason that I need a team in order to ace the challenge.
- The difficulty of the CTF was harder than I thought. I ended up in the CTF with 850 points (Maybe 950 points if I had not missed the free 100 points survey). The total score of the CTF is around 14000 points. I could get only 5 flags among 40 flags during the event. Even though I played without a team, the result was very disappointing. I hope I can solve some stego and crypto challenges next time.
Because, I realized that I can only try something with web based questions. I found out what I should study from now on. I think it is the most meaningful outcome from the event since it gives me a direction on what to study. - Lastly, If you want to write a walkthrough after the event finished, then you need to prepare the contents and materials beforehand. I was thinking I will post the questions and their solutions later, but when the time was up, all the web servers prepared for questions were closed and not able to be accessed. So I couldn’t take any screenshots. (Later, after I posted this writing, the servers were re-opened so I could see contents again).
Although the result was not good, I think it was totally meaningful in the sense of participation and that I checked my current skills and weak points. I will definitely challenge myself again at other CTF events.