Events
HTB University CTF 2024 recap
The sixth Hack The Box University CTF comes to an end after three days of intense competition between 8,300 students from all over the world.
JXoaT,
Dec 31
2024
Table of Contents
The Hack The Box (HTB) University CTF is an annual Capture The Flag (CTF) event where university and college students compete against each other for fame, prizes, or just for fun.
As long as they possess a valid academic email address, all students can join to play and learn in a state-of-the-art CTF covering multiple topics and difficulties. This year, 34 challenges from 8 different categories were available for everyone.
Students from all over the world who are passionate about hacking and are willing to test their skills participate. University teams from 101 countries joined the competition to submit 14,640 flags over the weekend.
The competition was a single-round Jeopardy-style CTF, about an interstellar bounty hunter who seeks assistance in freeing their space colony from the self-installed rule of the Frontier Board. Our rumble was set in the Binary Badlands, where our CTF challenged students to reach for the stars to find a precious artifact that would banish these treacherous varmints!
The winners
What an absolute stampede!
1128 teams corralled together to provide one heated showdown. When high noon struck and the dust settled your teams' valiant efforts drove off the maniacal Frontier Board. We can hear them hooting and hollering from here! A round of applause for this year’s winners:
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Hasso Plattner Institute.
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ESNA.
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NUS Greyhats.
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Phreaks 2600.
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GCC-ENSIBS.
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noreply.
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polygl0ts.
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BINUS University.
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frajers from FIIT STU.
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STT.
The University CTF Hall of Fame gets a new entry. Behold the list of champions:
The prizes
We keep pushing the frontier with our prize pool as this event grows. This year, our dutiful bounty hunter aimed for over $90,000 in prizes! But the most important thing was that all top-10 teams will get a chance to access our exclusive offering for Universities and further expand their skills.
First place
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Special HTB Binary Badlands Trophy.
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$3,000 cash.
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1x Golden Annual Academy Subscription (per player).
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1x $150 HTB swag card (per player).
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30-day access to HTB exclusive offering for academic institutions.
Second place
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$1,200 cash.
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1x Silver Annual Academy Subscription (per player).
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1x $150 HTB swag card (per player).
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30-day access to HTB exclusive offering for academic institutions.
Third place
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1x Silver Annual Academy Subscription (per player).
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1x $150 HTB swag card (per player).
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30-day access to HTB exclusive offering for academic institutions.
Fourth-fifth place
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1x $150HTB swag card (per player).
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30-day access to HTB exclusive offering for academic institutions.
Sixth-tenth place
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1x $100 HTB swag card (per player).
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30-day access to HTB exclusive offering for academic institutions.
Special thanks go to Ynov for sponsoring this year’s event, and helping us reach new heights!
What about the challenges?
This year’s CTF covered all the eight main categories, Web, Reversing, Pwn, Forensics, and Crypto. Plus the FullPwn category, which are our infamous boxes with a user and a root flag each. The difficulty ranged from easy to hard, with only the top two teams being able to solve everything within the timeframe.
The most solved category was reverse engineering, while blockchain seems to have troubled the players the most.
Participating is not only about winning but also about sharing knowledge. That’s why this year, we are also rewarding the best writeups coming from the community. Be sure to follow us on socials where we will share them!
And just in case you got FOMO after reading all this, you can get a taste by going over the challenges yourselves. All the challenges of the CTF will be uploaded as a track on our main platform, so be sure to keep an eye out for them.
The sharpshooter gallery
In the untamed depths of frontier space, it would behoove you to collect some of the wanted posters around the towns. If they are the Frontier Board’s enemy, they are likely to be an ally. Saddle up and learn the ropes from some of these sharpshooters that joined our cause. You never know when their knowledge will become a vital strategy.
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An Introduction to Applied Secret Sharing for Key Distribution by Aristomenis Tressos (rasti).
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Let's Sherlock! An introduction to Blue Team Training by David Forsythe 0xdf.
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When Smart Assistants Are Dumb: A Beginners Guide to Misconfiguring LLMs by Ryan Gordon (Ry4n).
Hack The Box for academia
More and more universities continue to join in this ultimate clash of academics. But, the fun doesn’t have to stop here!
You can incorporate HTB into your university curriculum to have a single platform for training, developing, testing, and proving practical, hands-on competence in cybersecurity.
Watch your students and classmates grow to prepare for the next showdown.
We saw a new face in the top 3, some returning top-placing competitors, and plenty of new faces along the way.
And get this, next year will only get bigger! Thank you to everyone who attended. If you didn’t have a chance to play, get involved and bring your university to this hallowed ground next year!
