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

    • Winners

    • 1st Place: Anonymoose - University of Edinburg
    • 2nd Place: DMU Hackers - Demonfort University
    • 3rd Place: NullGang - Warwick University

    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

    • 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

    Thank You's

    We're very grateful to the following people for making the event successfully:

    • 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.

    How Everyone Found It