Cyberlympics 2018

Earlier in August, the remaining TSS team members who weren’t representing in Vegas for DEF CON competed in the Global Cyberlympics 2018 elimination round. The Global Cyberlympics is an international online cybersecurity competition (or Capture the Flag — CTF) that’s been running annually for the past 8 years and has had participation from over 75 different countries. This year, 134 teams competed from around the world in order to qualify for the world finals live in Atlanta, GA, USA in September.

The elimination round was a 12-hour straight jeopardy-style CTF running concurrently around the world with challenges ranging from esoteric web application based challenges through to binary reverse engineering and complex message decoding/decrypting. Even though we in Australia are ‘lucky’ as our time zone is the most reasonable (10am — 10pm), we still found that by the end of the competition we were rather spent after hacking on challenges for 12 hours straight without any real breaks. In fact we only realised a little while after the competition ended that we forgot to eat any dinner!

Regardless, we had a great time and solved a large portion of the challenges through team work, perseverance, frustration, and sometimes just tedious bruteforce… oh and technical skills of course.

We stayed near the top of the leaderboard throughout the competition but there was some very tough teams with SectorC from The Netherlands seemingly always just ahead of us throughout. This year also featured the toughest Australian competition yet with 6 out of the top 10 placed teams in the world being from Australia. We had multiple Australian teams biting at our heels all day and night, including the much better named Ding0StoleMyPayload!, Kangar00tz, and Jim’s Pentesting.

In the last few hours we were holding onto second place in the world behind SectorC and with 45 minutes remaining managed to steal first place but when the dust had settled on a frantic last half hour, we were proud to be first place in Australia and second place in the world!

Given SectorC are my old colleagues from KPN in The Netherlands, I can’t think of a better team to beat us ;-)

All in all, I’m really proud and impressed with our team and can’t wait for the guys to go and represent Australia at the World Finals in a few weeks time. You can see the TSS team members who’ll be representing Australia here and the final scoreboard where you can see how close the competition at the top was here.

Good luck guys!