**A competitor from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates wins #HITBLockdown Open Battle CTF, organized by Hack in the Box, BHC Laboratory and hosted on CybExer Technologies’ cyber range. **
The 3-day hacking contest attracted students and hacking enthusiasts from across the globe. More than 150 participants from countries from all continents signed up for the event to take part in the CTF where they faced 42 various cyber security challenges.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the event was held fully online and was streamed live to YouTube, hosted by a popular Estonian recording artist and TV-host Karl-Erik Taukar. It was the second time for Taukar to host a CTF contest with CybExer. “It is great to be back after last year’s Cyber Battle of the Emirates and to help CybExer team organise something entirely different. You could really feel the excitement and the online format worked. This offers so much more opportunities to reach CTF-fans around the world,” said Taukar.
Dhillon Kannabhiran, the Founder and CEO of HITB Security Conference said that it was a pure joy to see how the Open Battle CTF worked. “What makes the CTF Open Battle so engaging is the visualisation, the commentary and well-thought-out scoring of the contest which makes it a sport-like event. Without that CTF could look like just a bunch of guys sending e-mails from their computers. I hope that we will have chances in the future to make even cooler and larger online CTFs,” Dhillon Kannabhrian said.
Andrus Kivisaar, CEO of CybExer said that the CTF Open Battle validates the company’s strategy to deliver large-scale cyber exercises and events. Our strategy rests on “three whales”: “First, automation that allows speed and complexity; second, our visualization for engaging user and viewer experience and finally our cloud strategy that allows unlimited scalability. This symbiosis is the game changer in large scale exercises,” Kivisaar said.
CTF (Capture-the-Flag) is a popular format for cyber security events where individual players or teams have to find the solution, or „the flag“ for a given task. Open Battle CTF pushed the players to find solutions to tasks in varying difficulty levels across multitude of topics like web-attacks, networking, tunneling, reverse engineering, Windows attacks, cryptography, code injection, API exploitation and more.
About ‘Hack in the Box’
Hack In The Box (HITB) is a series of network security and hacking related conferences held annually around the world. HITB conferences offer cutting-edge hardcore technical talks delivered by some of the most respected names in the computer security industry. Held annually in Asia, Europe, and now the Middle East they are among the foremost platforms for the discussion and dissemination of next generation cyber computer security issues.
