PRESS RELEASE: THE UCSB INTERNATIONAL CAPTURE THE FLAG (CTF) HACKING COMPETITION http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF When: Friday, December 5, 2008 What: The world's largest hacking competition is happening at UCSB! A number of teams from Universities around the world compete against each other in a security challenge called 'International Capture The Flag', or 'iCTF'. Who: teams from Universities in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia North America University of California at Santa Barbara, USA Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, USA Georgia Institute of Technology, USA University of Nebraska, USA University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA University of South Florida, Tampa, USA University of Florida, Gainesville, USA Northwestern University, Evanston, USA Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, USA North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, USA Penn State University, USA Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, USA The University of Texas at Austin, USA University of Georgia, Athens, USA University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA University of California at Davis, USA Europe RWTH Aachen University, Germany Supelec, France Ural State University, Russia Universita' degli studi di Milano, Italy University of Mannheim, Germany Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany University of Regensburg, Germany University of Hamburg, Germany Technical University of Vienna, Austria Tomsk State University, Russia University of Applied Sciences Ingolstadt, Germany Politecnico di Milano, Italy Ruhr University Bochum, Germany Oceania Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia South America University of La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina Asia Amrita School of Engineering Amritapuri, Kerala, India When/Where: Friday, December 7th, 2007 from 10:00am - 4:00pm, Frank Hall, Ground Floor near GSL/CISL (follow the noise) More Info: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF Description: An international contest including multiple teams from the United States, Europe, and Australia will be held on Friday 12/07/07, 10am - 4pm, at the Department of Computer Science of UCSB. The contest, (known as "Capture The Flag") is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of students from both the attack and defense viewpoints. This is the 6th edition of the security exercise, and its largest version. Each team is given an Internet server that provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included by the contest organizers. The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase, by finding the vulnerabilities and fixing them in their own copy of the server. The teams will also leverage the vulnerabilities they found to compromise other teams' servers. During the contest, an automated scoring system keeps track, for each team, of what services are available, and which services have been compromised (that is, "who is hacking who"). Points are assigned to the teams according to their ability to defend their systems and successfully compromise the systems of other teams. This unique international exercise involves teams at different universities, spread across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia competing simultaneously. This is the largest competition of this kind ever attempted. Other similar contests are usually held in a single physical location and/or involve a small number of teams. The event will be based in the Frank Hall, adjacent to the GSL/CISL and is hosted by Dr. Giovanni Vigna, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering.