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The Catch 2025 Writeup

The Catch is (my favorite) yearly capture the flag contest, that happens every October. This year, the highlight for me was probably the series of five challenges in FALCON. Integrating a "hackable" turret with a live stream of its robotic arm and laser was a nice touch. If that's something you are interested in, keep on reading.

This year I focused on the challenges in just two categories: Incident analysis (3 challenges) and FALCON (5 challenges) – all these challenges' solutions are described in this document. In the end I ranked 31st with 35 points (out of 58).

For some of the remaining ones I only did some initial exploration, but did not progress further due to lack of time. As of writing, I wonder how far the initial ideas are from the intended solution (see below for my notes); if interested in solutions, see others' writeups. I am looking forward to reading those, once published.

I would like to thank the organizers for keeping this CTF fresh

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The Catch 2024 Writeup

Another October, another The Catch CTF. :-)

I am glad I could participate again but due to the limited amount of time I could dedicate to the CTF. I started late (no First Blood award this time), and I only solved a ~7 non-trivial challenges. Thanks to the organizers for the nice challenges. Snake game and Leonidas are my favorites this year.

Here are some notes which are hopefully useful to somebody dealing with similar tasks, or anyone who just likes reading CTF writeups. ;-)

List of solved challenges

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The Catch 2023 Writeup

This year we set off on an adventure with The Catch competition, sail the seas and get sea-themed challenges. If you are interested in how I solved some of them, you are at the right place.

Not bragging, but I got first blood (was the first one to solve) the Ship web server and Suspicious traffic challenges. Yay that feels good to be better than you! (just kidding; you guys are awesome and I admire those who got farther than me, especially The Legendary Top 30 players)

Joking/bragging aside, apart from competing, The Catch is all about learning about cybersecurity. I hope this (partial) writeup will be useful for those who got stuck in some of the challenges, or at least an interesting read for others. Perhaps someone in the future even bumps into this writeup when searching for a solution to a problem they are struggling with. (Hello random visitor from the future! I hope you find what you are looking for!)

Huge thanks to the organizers! I

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The Catch 2021

This started as quick notes rather than a full, detailed write-up. Please use this text with caution. If you notice any error in this document, please let me know.

The theme of the competition was investigating remains of a lost civilization: some IT equipment still running was found. A helicopter takes us to the excavation site so we can begin solving the challenges.

Table of contents

Solved challenges:

Training Camp