WarGames.MY 2011: First Malaysian Online 'Hacker Challenge' Sees Over 30 Teams in 'Battle'

WarGames.MY 2011, Malaysia’s first online Capture The Flag (CTF) competition, recently held on the 2nd July 2011, saw Malaysian hackers battle for fame and fortune during the 24 hours event. The competition attracted as many as 99 teams signing up for the competition however only 30 teams actually competed for the cash prize of RM2000, sponsored by System Defenders Sdn. Bhd, complimentary passes to HITBSecConf2011 – Malaysia, sponsored by Hack In The Box. Sdn. Bhd. and most importantly, the fame and glory of being crowned champions in Malaysia’s first online CTF competition!

The contest tested participants in 6 different categories - reverse engineering, cryptography, network security, digital forensics, web application security and general puzzles. Featuring a total of 18 challenges, at the stroke of midnight MYT, the first two levels, Forensics100 and Binary100 were released.

In the Binary100 challenge, the teams had to apply their reverse engineering skills in order to understand the inner workings of a piece of software, while in the forensics challenge, teams had to perform ‘real world’ investigations involving recovering files and other important information. The remaining level 100 challenges were Crypto100, Net100, Web100, and Puzzle100, each awarding 100 points per solution. The level of difficulty of a challenge also increases according the amount of points it carries.

At the 12 hour / mid point mark, a total of 11 challenges had been released with as many as 6 solved by participating teams and it was a close battle between early leaders team kueytiow and team p03p0wn throughout. At the stroke of midnight on 28th July 2011, the score sever was brought down signaling the end of the game. To be crowned champions required a team to complete at least one challenge from each category, however as there weren’t any teams who did, no winners were officially declared. As many as 15 challenges were released during the competition with team kueytiow finishing at 1st place, team p03p0wn finishing in 2nd place and team permaban finishing in 3rd. Fourteen teams actually scored points out of the 34 teams that officially participated.