Ok, maybe you have no idea what are we talking about, but this weekend took place the qualification/preliminary round for the CodeGate Hacking Festival. Of course we at Sexy Pandas couldn’t miss an event like this one, so we had the pleasure of participate and to realize about the high level of the competition.

The contest was built over 21 crazy problems that included stego, crypto, web hacking and exploiting… having only (cough) 50 hours to solve them. As already happened in other contests, we had a good start being in 1st position during a quite long time, but the last 15 hours were a pain in the ass. We kept stuck at some problems while the rest of teams were solving them with extreme speed and precision. Fortunately for us, the bell saved us and as you can see in the Final Rank, we finished in 6th place.

Despite our last 15 minutes of fame hours of hell, we can only thank the Beistlab staff for creating a wonderful game, and congratulate the rest of the teams, you guys are awesome! We hope to see you all in the final round ;D

Note: For those who asked why we resigned taking the 550 points from problem #21, here is the reason: we play for the challenge, the fun and making friends. Of course we like to win, but taking profit of a such situation means to avoid the challenge, which in turn takes away the fun and maybe the friends.

Update: A really nice writeup coming from the CGLT team at vnsecurity.net

an nyeong hi gye se yo!! See you in Seoul next month!

This year at the POC conference there was an special “event”. The staff organized a hacking/reversing challenge called “Hacker’s Dream” that was composed by two crackmes, two script deobfuscation tests, two malware-like samples to analyze and a network forensics challenge to solve. You can download the second place report slides (in korean) (seems that the winner team was unable to attend the conference and therefore, the second one had to do the speech). During this speech, one of our pandas was checking his own writeup against the speaker’s one and also had the oportunity to chat with other people that tried the challenge. That panda (yes it’s you, moron) missed to solve two parts of the challenge, one of them being Scripting#1. So while talking with somebody that solved this particular part and also had a report, we managed to convince her to translate it. Finally, after some panda laziness, here we have the POC’08 Scripting#1 writeup by Woos. Enjoy!

Note: As it seems that the original contest files are no longer available on the POC webpage, you can download here the Scripting#1 challenge.

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Annyeyong haseyo!!

Few days ago, the Power of Community conference ended, and two intrepid and “oppa” pandas were there to have fun and (cough) speak about malware unpacking.

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