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CTF Preparation

You ever thought of joining a Capture the Flag competition?

But you don’t know where to start?

The biggest (considered National level) CTF in Brunei is Cyber Battle CTF organized by ITPSS Sdn Bhd. It’s usually held the second half of the year, sometimes September, sometimes October. The recent one in 2024 was held during CySec Conference, this one is a conference by Brunei Cyber Security Association.

Anyway, without much jibber jabber, I assume you’re here because you are interested in participating in a CTF. This blogpost is here to provide some tips and links on how to prep your laptop/computer for the local CTF.

Categories

First off, here are the usual challenge categories in a CyberBattle CTF:

  1. Web App Exploitation
  2. Network Analysis
  3. Exploitation
  4. Digital Forensics
  5. Cryptography
  6. Miscellaneous

You can find tips on how to prepare yourself for each categories from these links:

  1. Trail Of Bits
  2. CTF 101
  3. CTF Tools
  4. Snyk’s Getting Started with CTF

Then, practice on these sites:

  1. PicoCTF For this you should head to their PicoGym challenges to practice
  2. TryHackMe This is a huge platform to learn and practice anything related to cybersecurity!
  3. HackTheBox HackTheBox is not really beginner friendly, so maybe attempt this once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics.
  4. Pentesterlab Pentesterlab’s content is really good and you get a really good practice out of them.

That’s it for now, I will continue with tips for each categories in the coming weeks.