ABCCTF 2021 Qualifiers

Official URL: ABCCCYBERHACKATHON

Organized by: CTF.NGA NaijaSecForce Initiative

Date: 16th – 18th August, 2021

Background

The NaijaSecForce team in partnership with the American Business Council Nigeria (ABC Nigeria) and Comercio Limited (a leading information technology solution provider in Nigeria) organized a Capture The Flag contest as part of the 2021 Cybersecurity Conference. The objective of the hackathon is to highlight the capacity in the space and show the importance of implementing a cybersecurity framework in Nigeria.

How it started

Before the CTF began, participants were split into teams of five (5) and requested to send their team information to the organizers. We had a total of twenty six (26) teams registered officially.

The Game

The CTF kicked off on the 16th with all teams receiving an email containing the very first challenge. Within this challenge were cryptic messages, which when successfully decrypted, provides the team with the URL to the CTF dashboard. Within 24 hours, only three teams were able to solve the email challenge.

In order to increase the spirit of competition, the fast solvers of the email challenge were awarded 500 points upon solve. A total number of seven teams got this extra points.

On the morning of the 17th, the moderators provided hints to guide other teams to solve the email challenge and the extra points was reduced to 200. Two teams were able to solve the challenge with the hints provided and got awarded the points. Much later in the day, the moderators released the answer to the email challenge which was the URL to the CTF dashboard, and no points was awarded after that. In total, 24 teams registered on the CTF platform.

The teams were provided with a total of 20 challenges in the domains of web, crypto, forensics, misc/OSINT, reverse engineering and pwn. In terms of difficulty, the challenges range from easy to hard. The scoreboard was very competitive as teams were solving challenges and surpassing one another in points and ranks. Moderators were also available on the discord channel to help teams out with any issues they encountered during the game. There were a ton of funny flag submissions made by participating teams :xD.

Funny moments

There were a lot of funny moments during the game among moderators and participants. We have captured some below

As generous moderators, we found a way to ease stress off participants

The End

The game ended on the 18th at 8PM (WAT) and the top ten teams that qualified for the finals are displayed below:

Feedbacks

We say congratulations to everyone that participated. It was a fun time for us, and we did hope all teams that participated had same fun.