We ran the first HackBack in March 2019 and realised that it was a really good way to introduce students to cyber security! Read the first blog post here: https://blog.tryhackme.com/hosting-our-first-ctf-hackback-2019/

To follow our commitment of making it easier for students to break into security, we ran HackBack2 in October 2019 with over 500+ participants(double the number of our previous CTF) and 25+ Universities.

Like our previous CTF, we selected the variety of challenges to cover what one would expect in the security industry. The categories included:
- Web Exploitation
- Network Security
- Forensics
- Reverse Engineering
- Enumerating and Exploiting Public Vulnerabilities
The Day
- 10:00am: We started the live stream to run through basic information about the point system
- 10:25am: With some delays in the live stream, competition begins!
- 3:30pm: closing live stream
- 1st Place: Anonymoose - University of Edinburg
- 2nd Place: DMU Hackers - Demonfort University
- 3rd Place: NullGang - Warwick University
- Our live stream kicked users off(because of too many participants) - such a great problem to have! We'll use a better streaming client for the next CTF
- With over 500+ participants, our servers responded very slowly and almost stop responding at some point. This caused a few delays but luckily everyone enjoyed the event. We've already re-architected to ensure this doesn't happen next time
- Context Information Security: Our Sponsors made it possible to give the winners very cool prizes and even submitted an interesting networking challenge.
- Sticker Mule: Sticker Mule very generously sponsored the cool TryHackMe stickers for the event
- You: Thank you to all the participants and university staff for coordinating the logistics and participating on the day of the event.
Winners
We also had a special prize to promote women in security. The prize was given to AFNOM - University of Birmingham with 11 women participating in HackBack2
Postmortem
Thank You's
We're very grateful to the following people for making the event successfully:
How Everyone Found It
Amazing time on Saturday taking part in HackBack2 @RealTryHackMe! Proud to say the top team from @dmuhackers have finished 2nd π² well done to all our teams - the turnout for 9am on a Saturday was unbelievable. Great start of things to come π #CTF #TryHackMe pic.twitter.com/HDbtPENfuh
— Chris Hatton (@hattonsec) October 27, 2019
π©1st CTF of the yr @CTXIS sponsored @RealTryHackMe #HackBack2. Well done all @enusec @ComputingNapier students bagging some flags! A few just starting out in CTFs great to see! A few old heads - 1st yrs to MSc and a real fun atmosphere! Teams finishing in the top 20 from ~200 pic.twitter.com/q5hIiZ0iKF
— Rich Macfarlane (@rjmacfarlane) October 27, 2019
First CTF of the year completed! It was a lot of fun, learnt a lot. Can't wait to do more this year! π@RealTryHackMe
— Alecia Wallace (@Gromit__) October 26, 2019