Bogus “CyBRICS” events precaution
6 December 2022
⚠️ Please Note: competition runners of CyBRICS Capture The Flag 2019, 2020 and 2021 (SPbCTF community) have not announced any plans on holding CyBRICS in 2023.
If anyone invites you to support, endorse or take part in an event claiming to be “CyBRICS”, we advise against looking at previous years’ CyBRICS CTFs to gauge the new event’s level, and suggest treating it as a separate event with no prior history—previous showrunners and challenge developers are not associated with running that one.
CyBRICS is a computer security competition (CTF) organized in a cross-university effort by BRICS countries academia.
In 2020 the event is organized by ITMO University and run by SPbCTF meetups crew (members of CTF teams LC↯BC, SiBears, PeterPEN, Yozik).
CTFs are competitive hacking events: like ACM ICPC, but in computer security. Teams get a number of tasks or challenges about cryptography, binary reverse engineering, web vulnerabilities, network security, digital forensics, etc — all the topics that computer security engineers work with.
Each challenge has a goal, e.g. find a vulnerability and extract the administrator's password from website database. Upon solving the challenge, team gets a flag — some secret string like cybrics{Na5JRe_g0_G3u_Z1P_Pu3PX}
. Team submits it in exchange for points. The team with most points, wins.
To be successful in a CTF, you basically need to know computer systems good and deep.
More info about CTFs on CTFtime website.
Sat, July 25th, 2020 10:00 UTC — Sun, July 26th, 2020 10:00 UTC (24 hours)
The competition is open to any teams, with any number of people.
There will be 28 challenges assorted into seven categories:
Each category will have four difficulty levels: Baby, Easy, Medium and Hard.
Dynamic scoring will be used: the more teams solve a challenge, the less it will cost in the end.
In addition to cash prizes, we have some special awards for you from our beloved partners:
XCTF League gives the CyBRICS 2020 winner a spot in on-site XCTF Finals in China. It's a yearly event that clashes winners of multiple CTFs in an Attack-Defense competition for some good prizes. Place and date will be notified later, after COVID is over.
Positive Technologies invites each of the Top-3 teams to the PHDays 10 international infosec convention in Moscow. 5 tickets per team will be awarded. Positive Hack Days is a spectacular yearly event that features multi-track talks with speakers from all over the world, fun activities and plenty of contests on the spot. Date will be notified later, after COVID is over.
BI.ZONE will provide each Top-3 team with 5 tickets to their OFFZONE 3.0 security conference, also in Moscow. OFFZONE will be held for the third time next year, and in addition to international speakers, on-site CTF and tattoos, it rocks a separate zone devoted to Hardware Security and one on Financial Security. Date will be notified later, after COVID is over.
CTFs allow using any means or tools to solve challenges and outperform other teams.
At the same time, some actions can break the fun for other people. For example:
For example:
Organizers will guard the fun by punishing the fun-ruiners.
Good luck!
Should any questions arise, please contact us at
E-mail: orgs@cybrics.net
Telegram: @cybrics
WeChat: spbctf