HTB Business CTF 2021 was a Smash Success!

Hack The Box had our very first Business CTF just recently, from July 23^rd to July 25^th. To say the event was a smash success would be an understatement. Frankly, our event was more successful than we ever could have possibly imagined! You know what that means? We’re going to have a Business CTF each and every year. And things can only go up from here. We first mentioned the CTF on our blog about a month ago if you’d like to check that out.

Capture The Flag games in the context of cybersecurity and hacking are competitions where multiple hackers or teams of hackers hunt for metaphorical flags in an application, virtual machine, or virtualized network. The flags could be a line of code or any sort of hidden entity in software. Our Business CTF brings multiple teams together to compete against each other to see which teams can find the most flags. The teams who compete in our Business CTF are from companies of many sizes and in many different industries around the world. Our Business CTF is a fun way to train your employees to hone their cyber offensive skills in order to make your corporate networks more secure.

The winners

I know why you’re here. You want to find out who won, right? Well quite frankly, every single participant won, because they had fun and improved their hacking skills. 

“Come on, Kim. Give me the actual winners list.”

Fine! Here it is. Each of these companies and their teams deserve a round of applause. They fought very, very hard. Bravo, everyone!

• First place goes to Xormatic!

• Second place goes to Synacktiv!

• Third place goes to StandardNerds from StandardChartered!

• Fourth place goes to INGBank!

• Last but not least, fifth place goes to 0xCD00 from Orange Cyberdefense!

Congratulations everyone! When you go back to the office this week, you have every right to brag.

“HTB Business CTF 2021 was great. We all had a ton of fun and learned a lot. I most definitely would recommend the event to fellow cyber teams. HTB has the best selection of machines out of any CTF, hands down. The staff and support team has been superb as well, answering any questions we had within a few minutes! HTB offers a premium CTF experience that you cannot find anywhere else. Getting the team together and working on the challenges together was without a doubt the highlight from my perspective. Will join again next year.”

Harald Andreasen, Founder @ Xormatic 
Xormatic CTF Team Captain

“I really liked the HTB Business CTF 2021. Overall the challenges were pretty realistic, which is a big plus for me. Would definitely recommend joining the CTF, as it lets you test your skills in realistic scenarios, and challenge yourself against the best specialists in the field. The best moment was solving the Ghost challenge which was quite challenging. We will join again next year.”

Lukasz Lamparski, Security Manager | Senior Incident Responder @ ING
INGBank CTF Team Captain

“This was a very well-organized CTF. Would definitely recommend it to peers and other companies, and we will be looking to join next year as well. The biggest highlight of our experience during the hacking competition was the ability to learn new tech by exploitation.”

Tomasz Bukowski, Senior Red Team Operations Expert @ Standard Chartered 
StandardNerds CTF Team Captain

The prizes

Our winners were motivated to show off their hacking skills. But they probably also were motivated by our huge competition prizes. They won £20,000 worth of prizes in total. Here’s what our winners received:

• For first place, Xormatic’s team won six months worth of HTB Academy for Business training, a huge HTB trophy for the whole team, and Super Hacker capes for each of the team members, each player received a $100 Synack Swag Box, a £100 HTB Swag Card, a $50 HackerOne Swag Box, and the team received a $150 Hak5 Gift Card.

• For second place, Synacktiv’s team won six months worth of HTB Advanced Dedicated Labs for Business, a $100 Hak5 Gift Card for the team, and each player received a £50 HTB Swag Card.

• For third place, StandardNerds won three months worth of HTB Academy for Business, the team won a $50 Hak5 Gift Card, and each player received a £25 HTB Swag Card.

• For fourth and fifth place, INGBank’s team’s players and 0xCD00’s players each received an HTB Pro Lab of their choice for a month and a £25 HTB Swag Card.

Honestly, I’m envious of those prizes. Wouldn’t I look good in a cape?

The sponsors

Our corporate sponsors were crucial to our event’s success. Thank you so much to our Diamond sponsor Synack, our Base sponsors NTT and Datadog, and our Swag supporters HackerOne and Hak5. Hey Hak5, I’m still enjoying the Shark Jack my boyfriend got me for Christmas.

Give me the nerdy stats!

You might be thinking, “just give me the stats!” Okay, here they are:

• A total of 1,619 players participated.

• A whopping 2,922 flags were submitted!

• 374 corporate teams in total competed.

• They came from 66 countries around the world!

• There were 24 challenges between 10 machines. All 44 flags were found!

• An amazing 1,476 certificates were granted to the players.

• 2,400 CPEs in total were earned by participants.

• All of our prizes are worth £20,000 in total. WOW!

Our Business CTF was made possible by the hard work of our HTB team members. They were so busy this month! 

Thank you Soti “r0adrunn3r” Giannitsari, our Senior Community Manager for your tireless work behind the scenes and for being an amazing host.

Thank you Nikos “makelaris” Bantaliants and our content team for designing the CTF challenges and machines.

Thank you Giacomo “jackb” Bertollo, Sam Oliver, and Daphne Deiktaki for your marketing work.

Thank you Thiseas Meggos and our infrastructure team for keeping our hardware and network going.

Thank you Daria Skidanenko for her beautiful graphic design work and Alexandros Skarmitzos for the development of the event’s landing page.

What players said on social media

Our HTB Business CTF has gotten a lot of attention on LinkedIn and Twitter:

Check out more resources about the event!

All four hours of our pre-Business CTF talks on July 22^nd can be enjoyed here:

Here’s John Hammond’s YouTube video about our Business CTF:

Watch our winners ceremony on our Twitch channel via https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1098541695.

Here’s how your business can benefit from Hack The Box

Check out our Business CTF page to find out how your company can run your own Capture The Flag event.

Whether or not your business participated in our Business CTF, Hack The Box has lots of fun, gamified cyber training programs that can help your company improve your cybersecurity.

Check out our Dedicated Labs, Professional Labs, and our HTB Academy for Business.