A look back on the Content Creators Club: Tips, tricks, and tactics
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White hats off to everyone who entered
First off, a huge congratulations to everyone who submitted a challenge. We know how daunting and difficult it can be to consider so many different elements and bring them together in a fun, functional way.
We were so pleased to see such an extensive range of challenges — from easy, encouraging ones, awesome for newcomers, to more advanced concepts, which would have even cyber experts scratching their heads. The quality of submissions was phenomenal.
Need a confidence boost for next time?
Was our Content Creators Club CTF harder than you expected? Maybe you found it more complex to create a challenge than you first thought or something meant that it couldn’t be featured in the end competition. Whatever the digital dilemma, read on for some tips, tricks, and tactics on how to improve next time. And remember to keep perspective — creating challenges are designed to stretch your mind and skill set!
The perfect challenge recipe
First of all, it’s good to remember the criteria for a winning challenge. Typically, we’re looking for challenges that:
- Are well-documented and well-structured
- Feature a novel concept and focus on a specific learning objective
- Unique and innovative in their aims — beyond what you’d see in a typical CTF
- Produced to exceptionally high quality
- Accessible, fun and functional, appealing to a range of abilities
A great example of someone who ticked these boxes were our top five creators. There were so many impressive entries, combining technical skill and imagination, that our team found it tricky to agree on the top 12, let alone the top five! But these cyber stars stood out from the crowd by focusing on the above criteria.
We were so impressed with our content creators that we asked them to join James Lyne for a walk-through of their challenge. Watch them below and you’ll see how their well-documented, unique, and accessible challenges were brought to life in the competition!
Infiltrating Accounts by Malcom Barclay https://vimeo.com/444233002/85af05f91e
Ring Ring by George Omnet
https://vimeo.com/442968754/ef3c8745bf
Light speed by Ana
https://vimeo.com/447139254/ba653faab4
Smash n Cache by Nathan M
https://vimeo.com/441273703/5d77b56ce6
Waste of Space by Katy Harrington
https://vimeo.com/440034147/a67ce18547
3 tips for smashing the next Content Creators Club
So now you know what makes a perfect challenge, here are our three top tips when tackling your next challenge concept.
- Imagine the player as you are building. It can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of the design phase and not focus directly on user experience. Remember to look at developing niche gaps and under-represented areas, but make it efficient and resilient too. Your challenge will be played by hundreds, if not thousands of people — what if someone is able to manipulate it? If they break it, will it break for others too? Remember that you’ll be passing this challenge on to be developed and built by industry experts with little communication, so ensure it’s accessible and understood by them too.
- Keep quality control in check — test, test, and test again. The majority of you were awesome in keeping quality control in check. You obviously tested it out many times and got your friends and family involved to test too. Super work. Remember if you’re planning to enter the next CCC CTF to use the right structure, document in the right places, and ensure another team member is able to receive your challenge and build it with all the necessary steps in place. It needs to be scalable and resilient and check every single element and mechanism — if a different image comes up, finding the flag within that image won’t just be tricky, it’ll be impossible! This will help you both in the CCC CTF and in a real-life cyber role, where you’ll need absolute clarity of communication to succeed.
- Proceed with caution when using obscurity. When using obscurity, make sure it’s still solvable. A random bit of data might be understood by you, but it may end up just being time-consuming and not a very practical learning outcome for the player. Some of your challenges fell into this trap — we know you’re trying your best to add fun, functional elements and make your peers really use every skill to smash the challenge, but remember to make it realistic so that players can achieve this in a one week CTF rather than need a 6-month security training program to complete it.
Claim your exclusive CCC badge
You worked exceptionally hard to participate in our Content Creators Club. So, we want to reward you for all your efforts and help you demonstrate your expert ability.
We’ll be issuing a number of exclusive rewards badges that you can display on your resume to show future employers that you took part in the first-ever Content Creators Club CTF through Cyber Discovery. This will instantly prove your determination, originality, and achievements.
There will be three badges on offer: Selected Challenge, Featured Challenge, Top 5 Creator.
If you made it into any of these categories, we will shortly be emailing you with more information! The badges will come from Badgr. If you don’t see them straight away, check your junk folder.
Plus, keep an eye out for this month's monthly download as we will be showing you how you can add these to your Linkedin CV and share it on social!
