From Idea to Leaderboard: A Full-Stack CTF in Six Weeks
Service: Cybersecurity Training & CTF Platform
Industry: Information Security
Region: Kazakhstan
Background
Over the course of roughly one and a half months, and in close collaboration with our partners, our team designed and delivered a Capture The Flag (CTF) tournament that combined offensive and defensive security scenarios. The result was a hands-on competition that let both newcomers and seasoned professionals sharpen their skills in a realistic, fully monitored environment.
What Is a CTF?
A CTF is a competitive cyber-security exercise in which participants solve tasks—called challenges—to retrieve secret strings known as flags. Each flag is proof of a successful exploit, forensic discovery, or analytic breakthrough. Points are awarded per flag, and a live scoreboard keeps the competition intense from start to finish.
The Platform That Powered the Game
- Multi-category challenge library — Offensive, defensive, reverse-engineering, and OSINT tasks in one place.
- Self-service registration — Teams could sign up, form alliances, and track real-time progress.
- Dynamic scoring & live leader board — Immediate feedback keeps motivation high and rankings transparent.
- Admin console with full audit logging — One-click challenge resets, user management, and incident forensics.
- Scalable infrastructure — Isolated VM sets for Linux and Windows spun up per team, plus micro-services for individual tasks.
Learning Resources for Every Level
We bundled step-by-step write-ups, cheat-sheets, and short explainer videos so that absolute beginners could get up to speed without slowing down veteran hackers. These materials remain available after the event, turning the CTF into a lasting training asset.
Purpose-Built Virtual Labs
- Per-team sandboxes : Each group received its own Linux and Windows machines.
- Dedicated task infrastructure : PCAP repositories, vulnerable web apps, and custom malware samples were isolated to prevent cross-team interference.
- Snapshot & reset : With a click, any VM could be rolled back to its pristine state, letting participants iterate without fear.
Sample Challenges
- Sysmon Log Analysis — Identify UltraVNC-based malware by counting specific Event IDs, spotting timestomping, and tracing fake C2 domains/IPs.
- Banking-Sector SOC Incident — Parse packet captures to locate initial-compromise IPs, extract malware hashes & family, determine first-seen time, and uncover covert HTTPS-tunneling ports.
- Power-Station Phishing (SOC-TÉC) — Trace spear-phish sender, date-stamp the domain registration, map to MITRE ATT&CK sub-technique, and name the malicious attachment.
- Airport Malware Reverse-Engineering — Produce binary hash, identify language & compiler version, and reveal the last application the victim had open at execution time.
- Web-Application Breach — From reconnaissance to privilege escalation: enumerate open ports, harvest hidden flags, dump DB secrets, recover an SSH password, and ultimately extract `/root/flag.txt`.
Conclusion
From the start to the closing ceremony, the CTF – a smooth launch with infrastructure, tasks and support – was executed flawlessly together with our partners. The great degree of satisfaction with the depth, balance, and general quality of the event expressed by client partners confirmed that our tailored CTF structure offers an interesting learning environment, while fairly reflecting the real-world needs of cybersecurity. Whether you are developing the next generation of defenders or ready experienced hackers for a new challenge, we are here to translate theory into muscle memory for your team.
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