March 18, 2015
NULLCON is an international security conference which is a four day event comprising of talks, workshops, training, exhibition, cyber security challenges, recruiting opportunities and business/recreational networking. It is one of the largest international security events in the Asian subcontinent in terms of the new content and participation. NULLCON 2015 was held at Bogmallo resort of the beautiful state of Goa. More information on NULLCON can be found on it’s official website [http://nullcon.net/website/]
Our CTF event at NULLCON was one of the two CTFs held at the conference this year. It was only for women and it was the first of its kind in any Indian Information Security Conference. Our event was held on the last day. Women attendees of the conference took part in it. 12 participants in 3 teams eagerly worked on the challenges and attempted to crack them. The entire duration of the event was for 3 hours.
The event started with us helping the participants to install and set up the vulnerable machine on each of their machines. Once the installation was done, the teams started to hack the challenges ready on that vulnerable machine. A scoreboard was used to keep track of the progress of the teams. Whenever any team solved one challenge , they would let out a small cheer and this helped in boosting themselves and others to keep hacking. The spirit of competition was keeping everyone motivated. At the end of the 3 hours, the team that had managed to get most of the solutions was declared as the winning team. The enthusiasm showed by the participants was indeed amazing.
We would like to thank Sneha Rajguru of Payatu Technologies for her immense help in conducting this event. We would like to extend our gratitude to the NULLCON team for such smooth cooperation for arranging our event. And ofcourse the participants require a special thanks for being so enthusiastic and eager throughout the event.
We’re working on bringing a bigger and better CTF challenges for our next event. Stay tuned!