I’d first like to thank everyone who worked hard to make BsidesIndy so awesome. It was the first time I have every gone and from my understanding, the first time it has every occurred. Needless to say it was a stunning success in my book.
When I go to conferences I like to always make time to visit the capture the flag events. Sometimes I do really well, sometimes I do rather poorly, and sometimes I just meets some cool new people, but I always send time at there. Simply put, there is just a lot of learn from spending an hour or several competing against others within the same industry. As such, Bsides Indy was no exception. I showed up to the BsidesIndy CTF table ready to learn some new tricks and got all set up.
In the BsidesIndy CTF, competitors could register as either the blue (defensive) or red (offensive) team. So while I was waiting for my login credentials to be generated, I looked over the score board and noticed that there was not anyone on the red team. So I choose to register as the red team, and quickly noticed that many, if not all, of the individuals at the CTF table on either side of me were on the blue team. So I started by doing some nmap scans on the /24 network that was given to me to test, but I quickly noticed that many of the blue team members were just yelling up and down the table, with information about each of the boxes. So I listened in for a while and was able to learn the IP addresses and services of many of the boxes. I then noticed that the gentlemen beside me was having some issues getting his web services up on a box he was working on. So I deiced to help him out and what do you know, a few config files, iptables rules, and service restarts brings to web services back up. However when I was working with him, I noticed that he kept referencing a web pages for IP addresses, usernames, and passwords. So, after helping him repair the services on the second box, I simply asked for the URL of the web page he was using and he was more then happy to give it to me. I then spent the rest of the competition, gaining access to different Linux boxes, establishing persistence, and hunting for flag. By the end of the game, I had active beacons on 5 different systems (Unfortunately not displayed at the end of the competition, when the screen shot was taken) and possession of several of the flags. I’m honestly not even sure, if my original nmap scan even finished.
