In early December, Poly’s Brooklynt Overflow participated in UCSB’s annual iCTF.
Every year, iCTF has original storylines and challenges. It’s really incredible what they do with the competition, and it’s always a great surprise. This year, participating teams were acting as countries in a government-sponsored cyberwar. Teams were given a collective target, the fictional country Litya, which was said to be doing evil things. The competition consisted of challenges against Litya’s infrastructure designed to feel like teams were dismantling the country’s evil activities one at a time.
Brooklynt Overflow placed 30th out of 73. Not as fantastic as we would have liked, but we have learned and grown from the competition.
Because our team is made of students who go to Poly, it changes considerably every year. This year, we had a very diverse group. This helped greatly for the split setup that iCTF has. This year and previously, iCTF has two different groups of challenges, a group of easier challenges for regular points, and a group of harder challenges for “leetness” points. We were able to split up our team among these two groups, and this worked out very well.
We had a good start on the regular points, but it took us a while to figure out the dynamics of the rest of the challenges. Eventually, we caught on, and were able to continue scoring points.
A couple of things we need to focus on for next year are:
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Better team resource management
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Scripting skillz
Overall, most of the team was happy with our placing, but we can do better. We’ll be back next year to prove it.