I’ve been seeing teasers about SANS Community CTF for a while, and the idea of a free CTF is intriguing. I have loved the tiny exposure I’ve had to Hack the Box, but really besides that this is all new to me.

They had a free community CTF in October, but I chickened out on that one. Well, I saw the registration for this one go live and decided I would just try it. I almost didn’t because I felt like I would bomb 100%. Well, I’m so glad I pushed through that and just signed up anyway!

I really liked the format. It was a bunch of Challenges, categorized as Easy, Medium, or Hard. (There might have been an Extreme category too?) They were also named with a convention that kind of told you if it was a networking challenge, or binary files, or cryptography, etc. You were awarded a certain amount of points for each challenge (based on difficulty) and could track your progress on the dashboard.

Beyond that, I got the impression that SANS doesn’t want people to publish write-ups for these challenges so I’ll keep my notes on it private. But I’m working on a GitHub repo to keep useful tools all in one place, so check it out and I’m so open to feedback on format for that one, it’s a work in progress for sure!

There were a few challenges that were fairly easy to figure out, but for the most part I was learning new things as I went and lots of trial and error! I got about halfway through the challenges, which I was pretty proud of as a total beginner. Also, I didn’t finish last so go me! 😉

If you’re ever looking for a fun CTF keep your eyes open for these! I’m hoping they’ll continue them in 2021.