A few years ago, I tried my hand at the, now retired, CAPTCHA Forest CTF, which was part of the nullcon HackIM 2019. I wanted to solve it using computer vision and machine learning. This started me on a path of discovery and incremental improvements that finally resulted in capchan, a generic CAPTCHA to text tool.
This post is broken into four parts:
The first CTF The second CTF Neural Network Fundamentals Creating capchan ATTEMPT_ZERO Starting the CTF – I connected to the netcat instance, but after staring at hexadecimal, I immediately closed it and moved on to try another CTF.
I created a small crypto style CTF for Black Hat last year (we’re training again this year, check our courses out) and hid the starting point in an “easter egg” on a deck of cards. The deck of cards are a custom design by the SensePost training team, which were themed around hacking and were handed out during the conference. This post covers how we built it, and how to solve it.
In 2023 we, the training team within Orange Cyberdefense and specifically Ulrich Swart, Matthew Hughes and myself, attempted to do something a little different for Black Hat with regards to our in class competition. Each year we give a select few students some swag for portraying the most “plakker” mindset, being active in class, or finding another method to solve the practical.
The concept we decided to explore that year was creating a deck of standard playing cards they could bring out when friends are over and become a discussion point. The cards have educational tidbits about some material they will learn on some of our flagship courses, specifically the Infrastructure, Web Application, Wi-Fi and Red Team courses each had their own suit.
I’ve come to realise that I wasn’t the only one that has never actually exploited an HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability, three years after James Kettle reminded the world of it. Like many, I’ve seen the buzz, read it all, thought I understood it, but honestly, I didn’t. While the potential impact sounds great from an attacker perspective, I’ve been mostly confused by a lot of it. That was until the 2022 HackTheBox Business CTF challenge called PhishTale in the web category came around. Focussing less on the overall solving of the challenge and more on the request smuggling, in this post I’ll tell you about my journey of how I finally got to exploit an HTTP desync attack (specifically HTTP2 request smuggling).
If last year taught us anything, it was that we can move quickly to organise a fully online hacker conference in little over a month. This year our annual, internal hacker conference ran from the 16th to the 18th of September, was attended by 102 hackers from 9 countries across 2 timezones, and was once again filled with epic hacks and laughs! In this post I’ll tell you more about the run up and execution of our internal SenseCon 2021! Some of this year’s challenges are available to play for a limited time on our Orange Cyberdefense Hacker Discord server as well. You can join using this link: https://discord.gg/yhfPKyBGbp.
On the 27th of April 2020 SensePost created a CTF challenge (https://challenge.sensepost.com) for the public. The names of those who managed to capture flags would be placed in a draw for a seat on one of SensePost’s upcoming training courses. The challenge was to grab as many of the four flags as you could. Each flag was harder to get than the previous. Engage the brain. The challenge started with a simple engage the brain ctf, where we needed to try guess the next page value by looking at the clues on the current page.