Post Event Announcement

Last weekend, we wrapped up DownUnderCTF (DUCTF) 2020, it was a rollercoaster 48 hours with 3000+ players and 1400+ teams registered.

DownUnderCTF was the culmination of almost 4 months of hard work from 13 different Cyber Security societies from universities around Australia. In the beginning we knew that DUCTF was an ambitious idea, but we decided to take our chances and are glad that we did, because it really paid off!

The DownUnderCTF team met for the first time (remotely) on the 14th of June 2020 and established as a group what we wanted to achieve:

“To run a sick CTF aimed for Australian High School and Tertiary Students with the intention of making the CTF community bigger and try to upskill the potential next-generation of Cyber Security Professionals.”

We think that it’s safe to say that we not only accomplished what we set out to do but managed to exceed even our own expectations.

Both tertiary and high school teams competed fiercely against each other over 48 hours for glory and prizes. For many players, DUCTF was their first CTF and for others it was just another weekend. Through the feedback we received, we believe we can confidently say that everyone managed to learn something new.

The community has been flooding us with their write-ups and support from first time players to experienced DEFCON CTF players. Showcasing what they have learnt and how they attacked unfamiliar challenges. We not only gathered Australian participants but a significant number of international players, especially from India and America. We couldn’t be more proud of the CTF community.

The DownUnderCTF team not only grew as future Cyber Security professionals, but we forged a new family; though the majority of us haven’t even seen each other’s faces (we hope this can change very soon!). We initially thought we wouldn’t have enough challenges to cater for such a CTF but we ended up with 55 awesome challenges from 20 amazing authors. Our infrastructure team supported these challenges with a custom back-end. It definitely had some hiccups but we learned a lot from the experience. Patching and redeploying challenges in the wee hours of the morning, and making sure it was a smooth experience for all players was definitely something new. You can read our infrastructure story here.

Though, this certainly could not have been done entirely on our own. We would like to thank our incredibly generous sponsors, Atlassian, Australia Information Security Society (AISA), BSides Canberra, CyberCX, Google Cloud and PentesterLab. We really couldn’t have done it without you. ❤️

Overall, we are incredibly happy and proud with what the event turned out to be. We didn’t expect the amount of incredible support we got. Thank you to everyone that played or supported. It wouldn’t have been the same event without you.

Put simply, we ran a sick CTF.

Check out the statistics from the CTF.

The challenges and writeups are available on GitHub.