CodiSec’s CTF team captured the most flags — and the title — at last week’s SecurityFest conference in Göteborg, Sweden. CodiLime security experts beat out 200 global competitors, going down to the wire against a Korean team they overcame only in the last 30 minutes of play.
Organised in standard jeopardy style, the competition comprised 23 tasks rife with intentionally placed security flaws from four categories: reverse engineering, web application hacking, binary exploitation and cryptography. Most of the challenges were ransomware themed, so the team analyzed essentially real security cases. Ultimately, CodiSec was the only team to solve the most difficult of them: “Wanna try,” which was inspired by the WannaCry ransomware that attacked hundreds of thousands of computers last month.
The team spent an entire night and two working days solving the challenges. For its success, they won a 5000 SEK donation prize, which it has sent to the Python Software Foundation. The team chose the foundation as its recipient because it produces what the security specialists and data scientists at CodiLime and deepsense.io consider to be among the most powerful tools available to them.
The victory bumped CodiSec up in the global CTFtime rankings. According to Captain Robert Tomkowski, the team is extremely proud of its performance, which again pushed its skills to the limit in a tough and sleepless journey. “But this victory is only one small step to our ultimate goal — becoming the best security specialists and winning the CTFtime global ranking.”
CodiLime CEO Tomasz Kułakowski echoed Tomkowski’s enthusiasm and drive. “CodiLime aspires to be the best in all of the most important, challenging and quickly developing areas of technology. We have had success pursuing this strategy in data science, and last year started our move into cybersecurity. We invest in our CTF team to help them develop quickly and become first-rate professionals. And there is no better motivator than competition! I’m thrilled to see the CodiSec team win a global contest and stay hungry for more”.
A division of CodiLime, CodiSec delivers penetration testing and malware analysis services. It uses the expertise it gains during Capture The Flag competitions to secure its customers’ data. It also supports the security research community by developing Veles, CodiSec’s open-source reverse engineering / binary data visualization and analysis tool.
