Tracelabs Global Missings Person CTF: Defcon Edition

Review

The monthly Tracelabs Global Missing Persons CTF was on August 8, 2020. Tracelabs partnered with the annual Defcon Hackers conference. We worked on eight missing persons cases.

I submitted 36 flags. 28 were approved and 7 were rejected. 36/6 hours = 6 flag submissions per hour.

I wanted to submit 50 flags and fell short! I would start my watch and mark on a notecard how much I submitted. Couldn't go fast enough. Some cases were hard to find information on. One person I couldn't find anything. No Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, nothing. It didn't help there were 1000s of them with the same name! The 7 others I found something on.

I had two favorite cases. For one of them, I found a secret West Coast LinkedIn from an adult missing on the East Coast. He had his face down, with the same name, same previous job, looked very much the same from the ears and chin. I took an email from LinkedIn and found a property. I submitted the property as a location flag (jackpot worth 5000 points). A location flag means you found the missing person. The flag got downgraded to advanced subject info :( . My judge escalated the location flag which was exciting news. I had an hour left in the competition and was pretty excited to wait on the flag decision. I couldn't focus and only submitted 3 more flags within the hour. Even though my location flag got downgraded, its pretty cool I at least submitted my first location flag. Its nice how my three pivots LinkedIn -> Email -> Property were accepted too.

To put in terms how big a location flag is, I was in 85th place and would've hopped to the top 20. I would've felt like "Guy wins third place" meme haha. Maybe Tracelabs will put my property in his missing persons report and investigators will pivot and find him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm applying to be a judge in September. I'll improve if I see others techniques and submissions. If not, I'll try to beat my 36 attempt, 28 accepted personal best.

Shoutout

Good job Password Inspection Agency and Shandyman & The Three Half Pints. Those teams had 178 accepted flags!! That means they could have submitted over 200 counting for rejections. I saw Joe Gray (PIA) compete by himself for one of these events and submit 74 accepted flags... That's what inspired me to do an All Might 1 v 4 this round. (Also wasn't replacing any teammates that dropped)

Shandyman and PIA

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