Ok, we can’t hide it, we finished on 7th place. That hurts. We will try to explain why or at least, what we think caused this madness.

This year we started like the previous one, although we didn’t draw first-blood (I think that taekwon or wowhacker did it). The team was working very well and we quickly got 5 breakthrougs (!!!). But that was all for us. At the end of the first day some major network problem took down the SLA of most of the teams and after that, we began to have serious networking issues. From that point to the end of the contest our network was really slow, with a lot of timeouts and lots of lost of packets. Also there was a strange behaviour of the other-teams services. We found very interesting the thoughts of Atlas from 1@stplace regarding this owning prevention.

We ended the day by solving the krypto service (kenshoto level, albeit it was really easy), but we were out of time and we had to wait until Saturday to launch it. Unfortunately for us, the networking was still unreliable and Sk3wl first and 1@stplace next stole our big chance (ouch! OMG they’re really fast). We had 2 more breaks for a total of 8 (the second team after Sk3wl with 9). As for the rest of the game, nothing more to say. We were trying to steal, trying to overwrite… got absolutely nothing. We felt like kicked out of the contest.

Seeing that the first place was impossible to reach and that our scoring was blocked, we decided to attack the most awful binaries and try to be on the top in breakthrough number. Unfortunately we spent a lot of time with binaries that were buggy and not exploitable and others that nobody solved because of their complexity. We’re preparing some interesting writeups so stay tuned

Getting all together, we got a nice amount of breaks and did it quickly, showing that we can show a high level against three CTF champions. A strange network behaviour fucked us for good, it was like somebody playing dirty on layer 2 or something like that. Maybe next year we’ll need to be Fault Tolerant Pandas

Putting asside our results, the other teams showed a very good level. Our neighbours Routards did an ‘in crescendo’ competition and managed to get the second place (good job guys!). After the great prequals and this second place, it seems that they will be a candidate for the victory next year. Our other neighbours were Shellphish… wow, Giovanni himself is a show (saludos del capitano quetecagas xDD) and they solved the Kenshoto party challenge. The other team that solved this challenge was Guard@MyLan0, we missed to chat with you guys. Also we had two korean teams qualified for the final round in Vegas, Taekwon-V and Wowhacker. It’s a pity that their english skills are a bit limited, because they are always so kind to talk with. Two teams remain, one is 1@stplace that just as last year was an example of cordiality. We just noticed (from the Atlas blog) that they lost one of its members. Sorry guys. This year 1@stplace ended by changing it’s name to 3@rdplace (or something like that)… you guys rock. It’s said in our country that a good champion needs to be humble in the victory and accept the failures, and that’s 1@stplace.

And last, but not least, Sk3wl 0f r00t. They became the Defcon 16 Guitar Hero winners… oh, wait, we were on the CTF, didn’t we? So what’s the point on playing GH there? Maybe they were trying to exploit the stairways to heaven theme. Sk3wl got 9 breaks and a high amount of steals and overwrites and enjoyed a quite peaceful final day of competition. Our kudos to them. They will be a tough target for all the teams next year ;D

As a special note, in this edition there were two girls in the contest (in two different teams). It’s good to see that the CTF is not a men-only game. There were also a lot of girls showing up at the Defcon, but the one that focused our attention was our beloved ninja-girl:

We can’t end this post about the CTF without talking about Kenshoto. It will be really hard to setup a contest like this one, and every year we can figure a bit more the effort they put on it. Also they tried to help us with the network problems, but it seemed like an X-Files episode: the truth is out there but nobody was able to find it. Thanks to Dr. Shoto and all his staff for setting up this wondeful game.

Hope to see you again next year!