So, I’m in this Discord server and somebody by the name @credmp thought it’d be a great idea to do an advent calendar of CTF challenges. Every day of december, up until christmas, a new challenge will open up. It starts out easy, accessible to anyone and will grow in complexity as time progresses.

For me, this will be a good opportunity to share some insight in these kind of challenges for people who aren’t familiar with them.

To get an overview of all my writeups for this CTF, go here.

What is a CTF?

CTF stand for Capture The Flag, it’s a kind of information security competition that challenges participants to solve a variety of puzzles. The challenges range from a scavenger hunt on wikipedia to basic programming exercises, to hacking your way into a server to steal data. In these challenges, you are usually asked to find a specific piece of text that may be hidden on the server or behind a webpage. This text is called a flag, hence the name “Capture The Flag”.