# Thread Handoff
- Thread: vivid-key-7483
- UUID: c5bd7cc4-7974-400a-af8a-7185e3b90888
- CTF: midnight-sun-ctf-2026-quals
- Challenge: slopgamez
- Runtime: codex
- Model: gpt-5.5
- Status: completed
## Transcript
- **Assistant:** I’ll start by inventorying `/challenge` and checking the exposed web app behavior. I’ll also post concise progress updates to the supplied webhook when network access is available.
- **Assistant:** The sandbox can read the local challenge text, but DNS is blocked for the target and webhook from the default environment. I’m going to request network escalation for the target probe and webhook posts so the challenge can be solved against the live service.
- **Assistant:** HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 13:04:21 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.67 (Debian)
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.5.6
Location: index.php?theme=themes/dark
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
- **Assistant:** The app is PHP on Apache and immediately redirects to `index.php?theme=themes/dark`. That `theme` parameter is the first strong lead, so I’m checking whether it is used as an include/path selector.
- **Assistant:** The previous approval did not persist for plain `curl`, so the follow-up probes hit the same DNS block. I’m rerunning those probes with explicit network escalation.
- **Assistant:** HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 13:04:34 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.67 (Debian)
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.5.6
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Wargaming Scene Phile
Wargaming Scene Phile
An Overview of the Wargaming Scene Through the Eyes of adc
In 2007, 3 dudes captured the first slot in the DEFCON CTF Qualifiers.
They didn't come from anywhere, and they werent actually planning on
playing, which is why they had to decline. The only explanation is
wargames. So if you eat your veggies and do loads and loads of wargames
you too will have brains, discipline, and hilarity.
And the wargame scene has bloomed! There are CTFs available just about
every month now, many of which can be played remotely. And persistent
shell-based wargames and web-vuln sites continue to run, year after year,
completely free.
Here's why I love wargames:
- The people attached to the keyboards on the other side
- Easy, piecemeal, bite-sized levels
- Decent learning curve on most games (easy to HARD)
- Easy to discipline yourself into a hacking machine
- Good ego-boost after trying to hack unsolved things gets you down
(see: real world)
- Friendly help readily available
- Knowledge itself is the reward, pure skill!
- Some people cheat, and those that do don't get much of anything out of it
- Cheating is more fun when noone knows how you cheated
- Adrenaline rush (though it's faded for me and others with great time)
I became addicted to wargames.unix.se in 2003. Before the summer, I had
been trying a website my friend showed me, hackerslab, but didn't really
get anywhere after copy pasting my way to somewhere not very far. The
swedish site was started by norse and had lots of other people
participating and making games, a bunch of which are still not far from
wargames today.
At wargames.unix.se something special happened for me though, it all
just really clicked. Perhaps it was the web design or maybe the slogan:
"Unregulated knowledge is pornography". There was just tons of cool
information being discussed in the forums and on irc, things people
wondered about, highly technical, and those people were exploring them
full-on. I think it really was the community. A bunch of charming and
cool swedes were making fun, addictive wargames to play. The attitude
there was A+, the challenges were good, and something about the way
they were presented just made them very appealing. It could have been the
scoreboard, or just listening in on the irc and thinking damn, these are
some genuine hackers. And people were very polite and helpful. Some of
those early games can still be played on overthewire.org:
Leviathan - this was the first shell based game, where all newbies start
Behemoth - where I exploited my first buffer overflow
Utumno - A little harder
Maze - Harder again, easy remotes
There used to be a bunch of other games on wargames.unix.se, some that
taught network skills, and then some that did crypto from easy (balthasar)
to hard (halls of despair) to insane (halls of torment).
The four shell-based games above I would highly recommend to anyone just
starting out. They are just easy enough that it's welcoming to a beginner
but after leviathan the esoterism begins to seep through and make the
levels something else altogether. They're fun and captivating to this
day.
The thing of it is, I used to actually get a huge adrenaline rush from
solving these back then. Like my heart would be pounding while I was
waiting for some shellcode to land, and when it did, it was always a
great smile. After spending an evening to a week or two miserably stuck,
taking copious notes, and then finally solving a level, I couldn't wait
to be working my way up to the next one. It was really damn addictive.
Oddly enough, real-world hacks rarely got close to the rush from wargames
for me, as the real world has lots of complications which my biology
begins to think about.... I'm weird.
Many wargamers also keep copious notes in order to capture the subtleties
of the different game levels. The notes directories usually begin only
with the credentials for each level, but as most wargamers find, the notes
directory tends to escalate. It contains for each level of each game: which
vulnerabilities have been identified, which exploits might work, which
exploits failed, and finally which exploits succeeded. It's also a good
idea to keep notes on different shellcodes, different techniques for
debugging, heap tricks, and so on. I would probably learn a ton from the
disclosure of other people's notes :-).
wargames.unix.se transformed into Digital Evolution dievo.org and was
around until '06 or so. Digital Evolution was quite awesome. It had
basically everything I use from the internet still today: wargames, a
chill music station (delphium radio!), an awesome picture gallery from the
userbase, an extensive archive of links to knowledge, irc!!!, and
leaderboards to compete about everything on the website.
In '06 or so at some point the community dispersed after the demands of
running the site became too great for the people running it and the site
leaders just kind of moved on after a lot of downtime. runixd offered to
host the games and intruded.net came up. I helped restore and retest a
bunch of them. It seems like ages ago, but I remember administering the
games on user-mode-linux, then Xen (and finding tons of ways to kernel
panic), and finally Vserver. We stopped updating the games around '07,
and it turns out turns of privesc vulns were being introduced to the
kernel and libc in late '07 and '08, heh, so the games didn't need
too much maintenance for awhile. Till some hardware failed quite poorly in
early '11. Luckily, overthewire.org has taken everything back up in '12
and continues to host them
So tempting to namedrop some greetz here to all the nick, but archive.org
really says it best!.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050729112313/http://www.dievo.org/
So what's around today if you're looking to get yet-better at memory
corruption when CTFs are not around? I highly recommend two oldies, which
I consider transformative in my exploitation education. The first of
these is vortex on overthewire.org, the second is #io on smashthestack.org.
When I first played vortex, the first level showed me that I did not really
understand pointers as well as I thought I did. I recall andrewg telling
me to draw a stack diagaram. So I did, and finally the &s and *s made
sense when combined with my diagram and the assembly code. It was mind
bendingly difficult for something quite simple the first time through. And
other levels repeat the experience. Subtly exploitable bugs that at first
don't appear to be possible because of certain limitatio yns. The level of
difficulty does continue to grow until at some point you become somewhat
skilled.
When showing up to play #io, the first time through, I got to 11 and was
utterly disappointed until then. And then something happens, the levels
become hard. Quite hard. I had been a wargame veteran at this point, so
#io was a gift! Today, the first 10 have been rewritten to all be fun.
Now up to about 30 levels, #io continues to grow with well-researched,
subtle vulnerabilities for exploitation. At least one level has a real
world, remotely exploitable vulnerability found by a player and crafted
into a challenge for your intellectual pleasure. Beat #vortex and #io and
you will be rather _good_ at exploiting unix memory corruption.
After that, go play them all. Play every wargame. They all contain
knowledge that will enhance your skills. Also play CTFs when you can and
if they're fun! If they're not as fun or getting stale, then hack the
game!
- adc
old rant:
When I was younger I was aggressive and persistent, probably still so.
Wargames were the perfect outlet to mold my energy into some pretty useful
tricks. I remember coming and going back to wargames many times, the same
challenges continually kicking my ass. I started out as a google copy
pasta chef. I didn't know how to code very well, though I remember checking
out a copy of Turbo C once when I was 12, then a C++ book from the store
when I was 13, and being bored while attempting to learn something from it.
I still hate C++, I think that Bjarne Stroutsups overgrown haircut explains
it all.
I have always, always kept coming back to really play with the machine
though. I want to watch it tick and take it apart. I think I always had
the itch when peering into a screen.
I started out wargaming in 2003. From memory, there are some good ones I
remember from that year, there was web stuff like try2hack.nl,
hackthissite.org, and C stuff like hackerslab (a korean site),
pulltheplug.com (now overthewire.org), and wargames.unix.se (a swedish
site which later became dievo.org). I remember not really knowing my way
around a command shell after cheating on some of the hackerslab levels.
Then one day, a friendly hacker started talking to me through my bash
shell. I had no idea how he did it. Peering up, the difference of skill
level between us was laughable. I wanted to learn :-)
Wargaming in the military is running battle simulations. Wargaming for
computer security is also a simulation. The nice thing about computers is
that they enable very cheap simulations on very real systems. When
wargaming really started to take off in the early 2000s, internet
connections became cheaper as did servers, so it wasn't too much of a
hassle to host something. Though you had to remain careful where you
hosted in case you invited skilled company inside.
Sometimes the systems you're hacking are completely synthetic, which can
be quite tame at times. Sometimes the synthetic game is hackable to
reveal the real game, which is a lot more fun, and I always have more
fun when the real game comes out from the synthetic. For example, I recall
one roothack in 07 or so, eagerly awaiting Epic (RIP) to kick off a 5-way
king of the box game when felinemenace crew ended the game on the gateway
machine before the event had even started. Meanwhile, beist was on my team
had hacked another team's account, and we thought *we* were the ones being
cool...
Those two week lulls before classes would pick up again in high school,
and nothing felt better than procrastinating the binges of assigned
summer reading with some real intellectual stimulation of my own volition.
Landing some code.
Since 07, CTFs have just exploded. I am lucky to have played with the
loller skaterz dropping from rofl copters as well as RPISEC and pick up
teams here and there. One thing that always impressed me about the teams I
encountered was when they *hadnt* played persis
- **Assistant:** HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 13:04:34 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.67 (Debian)
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.5.6
Location: index.php?theme=themes/dark
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 10 May 2026 13:04:34 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.67 (Debian)
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.5.6
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Wargaming Scene Phile
Wargaming Scene Phile
An Overview of the Wargaming Scene Through the Eyes of adc
In 2007, 3 dudes captured the first slot in the DEFCON CTF Qualifiers.
They didn't come from anywhere, and they werent actually planning on
playing, which is why they had to decline. The only explanation is
wargames. So if you eat your veggies and do loads and loads of wargames
you too will have brains, discipline, and hilarity.
And the wargame scene has bloomed! There are CTFs available just about
every month now, many of which can be played remotely. And persistent
shell-based wargames and web-vuln sites continue to run, year after year,
completely free.
Here's why I love wargames:
- The people attached to the keyboards on the other side
- Easy, piecemeal, bite-sized levels
- Decent learning curve on most games (easy to HARD)
- Easy to discipline yourself into a hacking machine
- Good ego-boost after trying to hack unsolved things gets you down
(see: real world)
- Friendly help readily available
- Knowledge itself is the reward, pure skill!
- Some people cheat, and those that do don't get much of anything out of it
- Cheating is more fun when noone knows how you cheated
- Adrenaline rush (though it's faded for me and others with great time)
I became addicted to wargames.unix.se in 2003. Before the summer, I had
been trying a website my friend showed me, hackerslab, but didn't really
get anywhere after copy pasting my way to somewhere not very far. The
swedish site was started by norse and had lots of other people
participating and making games, a bunch of which are still not far from
wargames today.
At wargames.unix.se something special happened for me though, it all
just really clicked. Perhaps it was the web design or maybe the slogan:
"Unregulated knowledge is pornography". There was just tons of cool
information being discussed in the forums and on irc, things people
wondered about, highly technical, and those people were exploring them
full-on. I think it really was the community. A bunch of charming and
cool swedes were making fun, addictive wargames to play. The attitude
there was A+, the challenges were good, and something about the way
they were presented just made them very appealing. It could have been the
scoreboard, or just listening in on the irc and thinking damn, these are
some genuine hackers. And people were very polite and helpful. Some of
those early games can still be played on overthewire.org:
Leviathan - this was the first shell based game, where all newbies start
Behemoth - where I exploited my first buffer overflow
Utumno - A little harder
Maze - Harder again, easy remotes
There used to be a bunch of other games on wargames.unix.se, some that
taught network skills, and then some that did crypto from easy (balthasar)
to hard (halls of despair) to insane (halls of torment).
The four shell-based games above I would highly recommend to anyone just
starting out. They are just easy enough that it's welcoming to a beginner
but after leviathan the esoterism begins to seep through and make the
levels something else altogether. They're fun and captivating to this
day.
The thing of it is, I used to actually get a huge adrenaline rush from
solving these back then. Like my heart would be pounding while I was
waiting for some shellcode to land, and when it did, it was always a
great smile. After spending an evening to a week or two miserably stuck,
taking copious notes, and then finally solving a level, I couldn't wait
to be working my way up to the next one. It was really damn addictive.
Oddly enough, real-world hacks rarely got close to the rush from wargames
for me, as the real world has lots of complications which my biology
begins to think about.... I'm weird.
Many wargamers also keep copious notes in order to capture the subtleties
of the different game levels. The notes directories usually begin only
with the credentials for each level, but as most wargamers find, the notes
directory tends to escalate. It contains for each level of each game: which
vulnerabilities have been identified, which exploits might work, which
exploits failed, and finally which exploits succeeded. It's also a good
idea to keep notes on different shellcodes, different techniques for
debugging, heap tricks, and so on. I would probably learn a ton from the
disclosure of other people's notes :-).
wargames.unix.se transformed into Digital Evolution dievo.org and was
around until '06 or so. Digital Evolution was quite awesome. It had
basically everything I use from the internet still today: wargames, a
chill music station (delphium radio!), an awesome picture gallery from the
userbase, an extensive archive of links to knowledge, irc!!!, and
leaderboards to compete about everything on the website.
In '06 or so at some point the community dispersed after the demands of
running the site became too great for the people running it and the site
leaders just kind of moved on after a lot of downtime. runixd offered to
host the games and intruded.net came up. I helped restore and retest a
bunch of them. It seems like ages ago, but I remember administering the
games on user-mode-linux, then Xen (and finding tons of ways to kernel
panic), and finally Vserver. We stopped updating the games around '07,
and it turns out turns of privesc vulns were being introduced to the
kernel and libc in late '07 and '08, heh, so the games didn't need
too much maintenance for awhile. Till some hardware failed quite poorly in
early '11. Luckily, overthewire.org has taken everything back up in '12
and continues to host them
So tempting to namedrop some greetz here to all the nick, but archive.org
really says it best!.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050729112313/http://www.dievo.org/
So what's around today if you're looking to get yet-better at memory
corruption when CTFs are not around? I highly recommend two oldies, which
I consider transformative in my exploitation education. The first of
these is vortex on overthewire.org, the second is #io on smashthestack.org.
When I first played vortex, the first level showed me that I did not really
understand pointers as well as I thought I did. I recall andrewg telling
me to draw a stack diagaram. So I did, and finally the &s and *s made
sense when combined with my diagram and the assembly code. It was mind
bendingly difficult for something quite simple the first time through. And
other levels repeat the experience. Subtly exploitable bugs that at first
don't appear to be possible because of certain limitatio yns. The level of
difficulty does continue to grow until at some point you become somewhat
skilled.
When showing up to play #io, the first time through, I got to 11 and was
utterly disappointed until then. And then something happens, the levels
become hard. Quite hard. I had been a wargame veteran at this point, so
#io was a gift! Today, the first 10 have been rewritten to all be fun.
Now up to about 30 levels, #io continues to grow with well-researched,
subtle vulnerabilities for exploitation. At least one level has a real
world, remotely exploitable vulnerability found by a player and crafted
into a challenge for your intellectual pleasure. Beat #vortex and #io and
you will be rather _good_ at exploiting unix memory corruption.
After that, go play them all. Play every wargame. They all contain
knowledge that will enhance your skills. Also play CTFs when you can and
if they're fun! If they're not as fun or getting stale, then hack the
game!
- adc
old rant:
When I was younger I was aggressive and persistent, probably still so.
Wargames were the perfect outlet to mold my energy into some pretty useful
tricks. I remember coming and going back to wargames many times, the same
challenges continually kicking my ass. I started out as a google copy
pasta chef. I didn't know how to code very well, though I remember checking
out a copy of Turbo C once when I was 12, then a C++ book from the store
when I was 13, and being bored while attempting to learn something from it.
I still hate C++, I think that Bjarne Stroutsups overgrown haircut explains
it all.
I have always, always kept coming back to really play with the machine
though. I want to watch it tick and take it apart. I think I always had
the itch when peering into a screen.
I started out wargaming in 2003. From memory, there are some good ones I
remember from that year, there was web stuff like try2hack.nl,
hackthissite.org, and C stuff like hackerslab (a korean site),
pulltheplug.com (now overthewire.org), and wargames.unix.se (a swedish
site which later became dievo.org). I remember not really knowing my way
around a command shell after cheating on some of the hackerslab levels.
Then one day, a friendly hacker started talking to me through my bash
shell. I had no idea how he did it. Peering up, the difference of skill
level between us was laughable. I wanted to learn :-)
Wargaming in the military is running battle simulations. Wargaming for
computer security is also a simulation. The nice thing about computers is
that they enable very cheap simulations on very real systems. When
wargaming really started to take off in the early 2000s, internet
connections became cheaper as did servers, so it wasn't too much of a
hassle to host something. Though you had to remain careful where you
hosted in case you invited skilled company inside.
Sometimes the systems you're hacking are completely synthetic, which can
be quite tame at times. Sometimes the synthetic game is hackable to
reveal the real game, which is a lot more fun, and I always have more
fun when the real game comes out from the synthetic. For example, I recall
one roothack in 07 or so, eagerly awaiting Epic (RIP) to kick off a 5-way
king of the box game when felinemenace crew ended the game on the gateway
machine before the event had even started. Meanwhile, beist was on my team
had hacked another team's account, and we thought *we* were the ones being
cool...
Those two week lulls before classes would pick up again in high school,
and nothing felt better than procrastinating the binges of assigned
summer reading with some real intellectual stimulation of my own volition.
Landing some code.
Since 07, CTFs have just exploded. I am lucky to have played with the
tent wargames before. You
can have a read of atlas' blog to see what kind of catching up they have
to do. Many CTF players have managed to compress an year's worth of
debugging exploits into a few months, it's impressive.
Here's what I love about wargames. One, it will expand your understanding
of programs and debugging like nothing else can. Many wargame levels will
be little 100-line programs that don't *appear* to have any security
bugs and they will kick your ass for awhile. Others will be obviously
exploitable, until you go and try and exploit them, and find all the
difficulties whether an XSS filter, a NUL byte in the wrong place, or the
compiler reordering stack variables...
Two, there's always a solution* once a challenge is up. Some brilliant
minds thought through and tested something special just for you very
thoroughly to make sure you'd have a good time. Real world code can
REALLY kick your ass and get your self esteem down. It's hard, you can't
always be smarter than the programmers that wrote it. But a wargame level
was made to be broken. It will help you pick up the momentum you need to
tackle the real world again. *Some CTFs mess up the testing phase which
is disappointing for everyone.
Three, they come in baby steps. The way most persistent wargames and CTFs
are organized is through a potpourri of easy medium hard and random
challenges. Each challenge itself is usually quite manageable and
bite-sized. A well designed game makes it effortless to figure out which
pieces to solve first. A common strategy among wargame players it to keep
a copious notes with the successes (and sometimes failures) of each level.
I personally logged most of my failed attempts, and always felt great
satisfaction revisiting them. The games provided excellent facilities for
conquering genuinely hard, unknown problems with a lot of research, gdb
(or whatever web stuff for web stuff), and head scratching. Was also
always a joy ;-) to grab a copy of someone's note directory and learn
little tricks.
Four, you will learn real skills. There are skills encoded in the levels of
the games out there that haven't been yet published in an article. I'm
fairly certain #io on smashthestack.org revealed linux ASLR bypasses quite
awhile before they were patched and semi-public. Though many wargames start
out quite easy the difficult ones are there. And it is the difficult ones
that will transform you from a noob into a conscious hacker.
Five, the people. Yes some people are ornery, and if you're vain then you
think I'm talking about you. Some people are trolls. And some people are
just so genuinely cool. Throughout my time in the computer security space,
I am persistently impressed and inspired by people. Both competitively and
creatively, I feel like I've always worked best in pairs or small groups
of people. It's always just a pleasure for me to work with others. And
people of very different backgrounds and goals come to sharpen their skills
on wargames, which means there will be fun.
I remember the first guy I learned to exploit a stack buffer overflow with,
we both had no clue, but we figured it out after a few days of gdbing. This
was on the wargames.unix.se website, which I am EXTREMELY nostalgic for. I
owe Sweden a lot of beers.
Throughout the different wargaming sites and CTFs you will find lots of
different attitudes, some very mysterious people, and some incredibly
ordinary. Back in 2003 when I found wargames.unix.se I knew nothing but
just had a compulsion to solve some levels. I was doing whatever it took
to get to the next one, but I often couldn't figure it out *on my own*.
On wargames.unix.se I found mentorship and just a super inviting attitude
to do the hard stuff. The standard of thinking hard was well-ingrained,
and more impressively, people were just really damn friendly and accepting.
And the reason that is impressive is because I asked *a lot* of dumb
questions. It also had a great scoreboard with green dots that I lived for,
plus the rankings.
I'm pretty sure that I can crash in pads around the world on the promise of
explaining a wargame level to someone.
Steven, I'll race you...
-adc
Wargames: overthewire.org, smashthestack.org, hackthissite.org, try2hack.nl
CTFs: blah blah blah
OverTheWire
OverTheWire.org (OTW for short) is, as far as we are aware, the oldest
hacker wargame community on the internet. The goal of OTW is to learn
security principles and coding practices through a hands-on approach, and
have fun while doing it. The regular OTW community idles on IRC and is very
supportive of new users willing to learn. They answer technical questions
about the games, provide hints and often discuss all kinds of topics
surrounding computer security.
We currently host 11 online games and 3 downloadable images for games that
can be played offline. The topics covered in these games are typically
related to lowlevel security in linux userland (vortex, semtex, leviathan,
narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze, manpage), but we also cover commandline
scripting (bandit), networking (semtex), crypto (krypton), web (natas) and
some kernelland (monxla).
OverTheWire.org was originally called PullThePlug.com, and was created by
Brian Gemberling around 1999. It consisted of 4 physical machines connected
to a network in his basement, behind a cable modem with a single IP.
Through portforwarding, all these machines could be reached from the
internet.
More people joined in the following years and PullThePlug (PTP) grew out of
Brian's basement and into a dedicated hosting enviroment. Now being run by
a core management team and a lot of volunteers, the games existed on 4
physical machines and a bunch of vserver instances.
To avoid a conflict between the PTP games and Brian's business
(ptptech.com), the community moved from PullThePlug.com to PullThePlug.org.
After a dispute over the PullThePlug.org domain name, PullThePlug.org moved
again to OverTheWire.org around 2006.
At this point, most of the old games were gone and replaced by newer games.
Because of all the turbulence caused by moving domain names and problems
with hosting providers and DDoS attacks, development of new games stalled
out. It took a couple years before the server infrastructure got back on
it's tracks. By this time though, a lot of the crew had moved on to other
things.
In 2010, OTW created its first custom wargame for the French Hackito Ergo
Sum (HES) conference and has been doing that annually ever since: HES2010
and abraxas (HES2011) can be downloaded as VM images, while monxla
(HES2012) can be downloaded as a livecd ISO. Kishi, a custom game for 2013,
will be shared by HES and NSC (No Such Conference, also French) and offered
as a download later on.
In 2012, it became apparent that games from intruded.net went offline and
were staying offline. We were asked to adopt these games and, with the help
of their former administrators, managed to resurrect them all 6 on the OTW
servers: leviathan, narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze and manpage. In addition
, 2 games for complete beginners were developed to lower the barrier for
newcomers. Bandit focuses on the very basics of systems security, and natas
covers serverside websecurity.
Because of relentless DDoS attacks on both the OverTheWire.org and
SmashTheStack.org IRC networks, it was decided in 2012 to link both of them
together into one bigger network, reuniting us with our long lost brothers
and sisters.
This is not the end of the story.
We will keep working on developing new games and maintaining the old ones,
for as long as we can. Several new games are already in development,
covering topics such as kernel exploitation, web-security and others.
Many great hackers started out playing, or at some point regularly visited
the PTP/OTW games.
It's an honor to be part of their lives in this way and it is our hope to
continue to provide this kind of hands-on experience to the next generation
of hackers.
Remember, kids: "Experience is what you get, when you don't get what
you want!"
This looks like a good place to thank some people: andrewg, arcanum, astera
,aton, bk, Brian Gemberling, deadbyte, dusty, gizmore, jduck, joernchen,
kripthor, l3thal, malvina, mercy, morla, mxn, nemo, rainer, samy, everyone
else of #social and probably a ton of people who slip my mind right now <3
- **Assistant:** loller skaterz dropping from rofl copters as well as RPISEC and pick up
teams here and there. One thing that always impressed me about the teams I
encountered was when they *hadnt* played persistent wargames before. You
can have a read of atlas' blog to see what kind of catching up they have
to do. Many CTF players have managed to compress an year's worth of
debugging exploits into a few months, it's impressive.
Here's what I love about wargames. One, it will expand your understanding
of programs and debugging like nothing else can. Many wargame levels will
be little 100-line programs that don't *appear* to have any security
bugs and they will kick your ass for awhile. Others will be obviously
exploitable, until you go and try and exploit them, and find all the
difficulties whether an XSS filter, a NUL byte in the wrong place, or the
compiler reordering stack variables...
Two, there's always a solution* once a challenge is up. Some brilliant
minds thought through and tested something special just for you very
thoroughly to make sure you'd have a good time. Real world code can
REALLY kick your ass and get your self esteem down. It's hard, you can't
always be smarter than the programmers that wrote it. But a wargame level
was made to be broken. It will help you pick up the momentum you need to
tackle the real world again. *Some CTFs mess up the testing phase which
is disappointing for everyone.
Three, they come in baby steps. The way most persistent wargames and CTFs
are organized is through a potpourri of easy medium hard and random
challenges. Each challenge itself is usually quite manageable and
bite-sized. A well designed game makes it effortless to figure out which
pieces to solve first. A common strategy among wargame players it to keep
a copious notes with the successes (and sometimes failures) of each level.
I personally logged most of my failed attempts, and always felt great
satisfaction revisiting them. The games provided excellent facilities for
conquering genuinely hard, unknown problems with a lot of research, gdb
(or whatever web stuff for web stuff), and head scratching. Was also
always a joy ;-) to grab a copy of someone's note directory and learn
little tricks.
Four, you will learn real skills. There are skills encoded in the levels of
the games out there that haven't been yet published in an article. I'm
fairly certain #io on smashthestack.org revealed linux ASLR bypasses quite
awhile before they were patched and semi-public. Though many wargames start
out quite easy the difficult ones are there. And it is the difficult ones
that will transform you from a noob into a conscious hacker.
Five, the people. Yes some people are ornery, and if you're vain then you
think I'm talking about you. Some people are trolls. And some people are
just so genuinely cool. Throughout my time in the computer security space,
I am persistently impressed and inspired by people. Both competitively and
creatively, I feel like I've always worked best in pairs or small groups
of people. It's always just a pleasure for me to work with others. And
people of very different backgrounds and goals come to sharpen their skills
on wargames, which means there will be fun.
I remember the first guy I learned to exploit a stack buffer overflow with,
we both had no clue, but we figured it out after a few days of gdbing. This
was on the wargames.unix.se website, which I am EXTREMELY nostalgic for. I
owe Sweden a lot of beers.
Throughout the different wargaming sites and CTFs you will find lots of
different attitudes, some very mysterious people, and some incredibly
ordinary. Back in 2003 when I found wargames.unix.se I knew nothing but
just had a compulsion to solve some levels. I was doing whatever it took
to get to the next one, but I often couldn't figure it out *on my own*.
On wargames.unix.se I found mentorship and just a super inviting attitude
to do the hard stuff. The standard of thinking hard was well-ingrained,
and more impressively, people were just really damn friendly and accepting.
And the reason that is impressive is because I asked *a lot* of dumb
questions. It also had a great scoreboard with green dots that I lived for,
plus the rankings.
I'm pretty sure that I can crash in pads around the world on the promise of
explaining a wargame level to someone.
Steven, I'll race you...
-adc
Wargames: overthewire.org, smashthestack.org, hackthissite.org, try2hack.nl
CTFs: blah blah blah
OverTheWire
OverTheWire.org (OTW for short) is, as far as we are aware, the oldest
hacker wargame community on the internet. The goal of OTW is to learn
security principles and coding practices through a hands-on approach, and
have fun while doing it. The regular OTW community idles on IRC and is very
supportive of new users willing to learn. They answer technical questions
about the games, provide hints and often discuss all kinds of topics
surrounding computer security.
We currently host 11 online games and 3 downloadable images for games that
can be played offline. The topics covered in these games are typically
related to lowlevel security in linux userland (vortex, semtex, leviathan,
narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze, manpage), but we also cover commandline
scripting (bandit), networking (semtex), crypto (krypton), web (natas) and
some kernelland (monxla).
OverTheWire.org was originally called PullThePlug.com, and was created by
Brian Gemberling around 1999. It consisted of 4 physical machines connected
to a network in his basement, behind a cable modem with a single IP.
Through portforwarding, all these machines could be reached from the
internet.
More people joined in the following years and PullThePlug (PTP) grew out of
Brian's basement and into a dedicated hosting enviroment. Now being run by
a core management team and a lot of volunteers, the games existed on 4
physical machines and a bunch of vserver instances.
To avoid a conflict between the PTP games and Brian's business
(ptptech.com), the community moved from PullThePlug.com to PullThePlug.org.
After a dispute over the PullThePlug.org domain name, PullThePlug.org moved
again to OverTheWire.org around 2006.
At this point, most of the old games were gone and replaced by newer games.
Because of all the turbulence caused by moving domain names and problems
with hosting providers and DDoS attacks, development of new games stalled
out. It took a couple years before the server infrastructure got back on
it's tracks. By this time though, a lot of the crew had moved on to other
things.
In 2010, OTW created its first custom wargame for the French Hackito Ergo
Sum (HES) conference and has been doing that annually ever since: HES2010
and abraxas (HES2011) can be downloaded as VM images, while monxla
(HES2012) can be downloaded as a livecd ISO. Kishi, a custom game for 2013,
will be shared by HES and NSC (No Such Conference, also French) and offered
as a download later on.
In 2012, it became apparent that games from intruded.net went offline and
were staying offline. We were asked to adopt these games and, with the help
of their former administrators, managed to resurrect them all 6 on the OTW
servers: leviathan, narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze and manpage. In addition
, 2 games for complete beginners were developed to lower the barrier for
newcomers. Bandit focuses on the very basics of systems security, and natas
covers serverside websecurity.
Because of relentless DDoS attacks on both the OverTheWire.org and
SmashTheStack.org IRC networks, it was decided in 2012 to link both of them
together into one bigger network, reuniting us with our long lost brothers
and sisters.
This is not the end of the story.
We will keep working on developing new games and maintaining the old ones,
for as long as we can. Several new games are already in development,
covering topics such as kernel exploitation, web-security and others.
Many great hackers started out playing, or at some point regularly visited
the PTP/OTW games.
It's an honor to be part of their lives in this way and it is our hope to
continue to provide this kind of hands-on experience to the next generation
of hackers.
Remember, kids: "Experience is what you get, when you don't get what
you want!"
This looks like a good place to thank some people: andrewg, arcanum, astera
,aton, bk, Brian Gemberling, deadbyte, dusty, gizmore, jduck, joernchen,
kripthor, l3thal, malvina, mercy, morla, mxn, nemo, rainer, samy, everyone
else of #social and probably a ton of people who slip my mind right now <3
- **Assistant:** The page is static-looking text assembled with an inline `
Wargaming Scene Phile
An Overview of the Wargaming Scene Through the Eyes of adc
In 2007, 3 dudes captured the first slot in the DEFCON CTF Qualifiers.
They didn't come from anywhere, and they werent actually planning on
playing, which is why they had to decline. The only explanation is
wargames. So if you eat your veggies and do loads and loads of wargames
you too will have brains, discipline, and hilarity.
And the wargame scene has bloomed! There are CTFs available just about
every month now, many of which can be played remotely. And persistent
shell-based wargames and web-vuln sites continue to run, year after year,
completely free.
Here's why I love wargames:
- The people attached to the keyboards on the other side
- Easy, piecemeal, bite-sized levels
- Decent learning curve on most games (easy to HARD)
- Easy to discipline yourself into a hacking machine
- Good ego-boost after trying to hack unsolved things gets you down
(see: real world)
- Friendly help readily available
- Knowledge itself is the reward, pure skill!
- Some people cheat, and those that do don't get much of anything out of it
- Cheating is more fun when noone knows how you cheated
- Adrenaline rush (though it's faded for me and others with great time)
I became addicted to wargames.unix.se in 2003. Before the summer, I had
been trying a website my friend showed me, hackerslab, but didn't really
get anywhere after copy pasting my way to somewhere not very far. The
swedish site was started by norse and had lots of other people
participating and making games, a bunch of which are still not far from
wargames today.
At wargames.unix.se something special happened for me though, it all
just really clicked. Perhaps it was the web design or maybe the slogan:
"Unregulated knowledge is pornography". There was just tons of cool
information being discussed in the forums and on irc, things people
wondered about, highly technical, and those people were exploring them
full-on. I think it really was the community. A bunch of charming and
cool swedes were making fun, addictive wargames to play. The attitude
there was A+, the challenges were good, and something about the way
they were presented just made them very appealing. It could have been the
scoreboard, or just listening in on the irc and thinking damn, these are
some genuine hackers. And people were very polite and helpful. Some of
those early games can still be played on overthewire.org:
Leviathan - this was the first shell based game, where all newbies start
Behemoth - where I exploited my first buffer overflow
Utumno - A little harder
Maze - Harder again, easy remotes
There used to be a bunch of other games on wargames.unix.se, some that
taught network skills, and then some that did crypto from easy (balthasar)
to hard (halls of despair) to insane (halls of torment).
The four shell-based games above I would highly recommend to anyone just
starting out. They are just easy enough that it's welcoming to a beginner
but after leviathan the esoterism begins to seep through and make the
levels something else altogether. They're fun and captivating to this
day.
The thing of it is, I used to actually get a huge adrenaline rush from
solving these back then. Like my heart would be pounding while I was
waiting for some shellcode to land, and when it did, it was always a
great smile. After spending an evening to a week or two miserably stuck,
taking copious notes, and then finally solving a level, I couldn't wait
to be working my way up to the next one. It was really damn addictive.
Oddly enough, real-world hacks rarely got close to the rush from wargames
for me, as the real world has lots of complications which my biology
begins to think about.... I'm weird.
Many wargamers also keep copious notes in order to capture the subtleties
of the different game levels. The notes directories usually begin only
with the credentials for each level, but as most wargamers find, the notes
directory tends to escalate. It contains for each level of each game: which
vulnerabilities have been identified, which exploits might work, which
exploits failed, and finally which exploits succeeded. It's also a good
idea to keep notes on different shellcodes, different techniques for
debugging, heap tricks, and so on. I would probably learn a ton from the
disclosure of other people's notes :-).
wargames.unix.se transformed into Digital Evolution dievo.org and was
around until '06 or so. Digital Evolution was quite awesome. It had
basically everything I use from the internet still today: wargames, a
chill music station (delphium radio!), an awesome picture gallery from the
userbase, an extensive archive of links to knowledge, irc!!!, and
leaderboards to compete about everything on the website.
In '06 or so at some point the community dispersed after the demands of
running the site became too great for the people running it and the site
leaders just kind of moved on after a lot of downtime. runixd offered to
host the games and intruded.net came up. I helped restore and retest a
bunch of them. It seems like ages ago, but I remember administering the
games on user-mode-linux, then Xen (and finding tons of ways to kernel
panic), and finally Vserver. We stopped updating the games around '07,
and it turns out turns of privesc vulns were being introduced to the
kernel and libc in late '07 and '08, heh, so the games didn't need
too much maintenance for awhile. Till some hardware failed quite poorly in
early '11. Luckily, overthewire.org has taken everything back up in '12
and continues to host them
So tempting to namedrop some greetz here to all the nick, but archive.org
really says it best!.
http://web.archive.org/web/20050729112313/http://www.dievo.org/
So what's around today if you're looking to get yet-better at memory
corruption when CTFs are not around? I highly recommend two oldies, which
I consider transformative in my exploitation education. The first of
these is vortex on overthewire.org, the second is #io on smashthestack.org.
When I first played vortex, the first level showed me that I did not really
understand pointers as well as I thought I did. I recall andrewg telling
me to draw a stack diagaram. So I did, and finally the &s and *s made
sense when combined with my diagram and the assembly code. It was mind
bendingly difficult for something quite simple the first time through. And
other levels repeat the experience. Subtly exploitable bugs that at first
don't appear to be possible because of certain limitatio yns. The level of
difficulty does continue to grow until at some point you become somewhat
skilled.
When showing up to play #io, the first time through, I got to 11 and was
utterly disappointed until then. And then something happens, the levels
become hard. Quite hard. I had been a wargame veteran at this point, so
#io was a gift! Today, the first 10 have been rewritten to all be fun.
Now up to about 30 levels, #io continues to grow with well-researched,
subtle vulnerabilities for exploitation. At least one level has a real
world, remotely exploitable vulnerability found by a player and crafted
into a challenge for your intellectual pleasure. Beat #vortex and #io and
you will be rather _good_ at exploiting unix memory corruption.
After that, go play them all. Play every wargame. They all contain
knowledge that will enhance your skills. Also play CTFs when you can and
if they're fun! If they're not as fun or getting stale, then hack the
game!
- adc
old rant:
When I was younger I was aggressive and persistent, probably still so.
Wargames were the perfect outlet to mold my energy into some pretty useful
tricks. I remember coming and going back to wargames many times, the same
challenges continually kicking my ass. I started out as a google copy
pasta chef. I didn't know how to code very well, though I remember checking
out a copy of Turbo C once when I was 12, then a C++ book from the store
when I was 13, and being bored while attempting to learn something from it.
I still hate C++, I think that Bjarne Stroutsups overgrown haircut explains
it all.
I have always, always kept coming back to really play with the machine
though. I want to watch it tick and take it apart. I think I always had
the itch when peering into a screen.
I started out wargaming in 2003. From memory, there are some good ones I
remember from that year, there was web stuff like try2hack.nl,
hackthissite.org, and C stuff like hackerslab (a korean site),
pulltheplug.com (now overthewire.org), and wargames.unix.se (a swedish
site which later became dievo.org). I remember not really knowing my way
around a command shell after cheating on some of the hackerslab levels.
Then one day, a friendly hacker started talking to me through my bash
shell. I had no idea how he did it. Peering up, the difference of skill
level between us was laughable. I wanted to learn :-)
Wargaming in the military is running battle simulations. Wargaming for
computer security is also a simulation. The nice thing about computers is
that they enable very cheap simulations on very real systems. When
wargaming really started to take off in the early 2000s, internet
connections became cheaper as did servers, so it wasn't too much of a
hassle to host something. Though you had to remain careful where you
hosted in case you invited skilled company inside.
Sometimes the systems you're hacking are completely synthetic, which can
be quite tame at times. Sometimes the synthetic game is hackable to
reveal the real game, which is a lot more fun, and I always have more
fun when the real game comes out from the synthetic. For example, I recall
one roothack in 07 or so, eagerly awaiting Epic (RIP) to kick off a 5-way
king of the box game when felinemenace crew ended the game on the gateway
machine before the event had even started. Meanwhile, beist was on my team
had hacked another team's account, and we thought *we* were the ones being
cool...
Those two week lulls before classes would pick up again in high school,
and nothing felt better than procrastinating the binges of assigned
summer reading with some real intellectual stimulation of my own volition.
Landing some code.
Since 07, CTFs have just exploded. I am lucky to have played with the
loller skaterz dropping from rofl copters as well as RPISEC and pick up
teams here and there. One thing that always impressed me about the teams I
encountered was when they *hadnt* played persistent wargames before. You
can have a read of atlas' blog to see what kind of catching up they have
to do. Many CTF players have managed to compress an year's worth of
debugging exploits into a few months, it's impressive.
Here's what I love about wargames. One, it will expand your understanding
of programs and debugging like nothing else can. Many wargame levels will
be little 100-line programs that don't *appear* to have any security
bugs and they will kick your ass for awhile. Others will be obviously
exploitable, until you go and try and exploit them, and find all the
difficulties whether an XSS filter, a NUL byte in the wrong place, or the
compiler reordering stack variables...
Two, there's always a solution* once a challenge is up. Some brilliant
minds thought through and tested something special just for you very
thoroughly to make sure you'd have a good time. Real world code can
REALLY kick your ass and get your self esteem down. It's hard, you can't
always be smarter than the programmers that wrote it. But a wargame level
was made to be broken. It will help you pick up the momentum you need to
tackle the real world again. *Some CTFs mess up the testing phase which
is disappointing for everyone.
Three, they come in baby steps. The way most persistent wargames and CTFs
are organized is through a potpourri of easy medium hard and random
challenges. Each challenge itself is usually quite manageable and
bite-sized. A well designed game makes it effortless to figure out which
pieces to solve first. A common strategy among wargame players it to keep
a copious notes with the successes (and sometimes failures) of each level.
I personally logged most of my failed attempts, and always felt great
satisfaction revisiting them. The games provided excellent facilities for
conquering genuinely hard, unknown problems with a lot of research, gdb
(or whatever web stuff for web stuff), and head scratching. Was also
always a joy ;-) to grab a copy of someone's note directory and learn
little tricks.
Four, you will learn real skills. There are skills encoded in the levels of
the games out there that haven't been yet published in an article. I'm
fairly certain #io on smashthestack.org revealed linux ASLR bypasses quite
awhile before they were patched and semi-public. Though many wargames start
out quite easy the difficult ones are there. And it is the difficult ones
that will transform you from a noob into a conscious hacker.
Five, the people. Yes some people are ornery, and if you're vain then you
think I'm talking about you. Some people are trolls. And some people are
just so genuinely cool. Throughout my time in the computer security space,
I am persistently impressed and inspired by people. Both competitively and
creatively, I feel like I've always worked best in pairs or small groups
of people. It's always just a pleasure for me to work with others. And
people of very different backgrounds and goals come to sharpen their skills
on wargames, which means there will be fun.
I remember the first guy I learned to exploit a stack buffer overflow with,
we both had no clue, but we figured it out after a few days of gdbing. This
was on the wargames.unix.se website, which I am EXTREMELY nostalgic for. I
owe Sweden a lot of beers.
Throughout the different wargaming sites and CTFs you will find lots of
different attitudes, some very mysterious people, and some incredibly
ordinary. Back in 2003 when I found wargames.unix.se I knew nothing but
just had a compulsion to solve some levels. I was doing whatever it took
to get to the next one, but I often couldn't figure it out *on my own*.
On wargames.unix.se I found mentorship and just a super inviting attitude
to do the hard stuff. The standard of thinking hard was well-ingrained,
and more impressively, people were just really damn friendly and accepting.
And the reason that is impressive is because I asked *a lot* of dumb
questions. It also had a great scoreboard with green dots that I lived for,
plus the rankings.
I'm pretty sure that I can crash in pads around the world on the promise of
explaining a wargame level to someone.
Steven, I'll race you...
-adc
Wargames: overthewire.org, smashthestack.org, hackthissite.org, try2hack.nl
CTFs: blah blah blah
OverTheWire
OverTheWire.org (OTW for short) is, as far as we are aware, the oldest
hacker wargame community on the internet. The goal of OTW is to learn
security principles and coding practices through a hands-on approach, and
have fun while doing it. The regular OTW community idles on IRC and is very
supportive of new users willing to learn. They answer technical questions
about the games, provide hints and often discuss all kinds of topics
surrounding computer security.
We currently host 11 online games and 3 downloadable images for games that
can be played offline. The topics covered in these games are typically
related to lowlevel security in linux userland (vortex, semtex, leviathan,
narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze, manpage), but we also cover commandline
scripting (bandit), networking (semtex), crypto (krypton), web (natas) and
some kernelland (monxla).
OverTheWire.org was originally called PullThePlug.com, and was created by
Brian Gemberling around 1999. It consisted of 4 physical machines connected
to a network in his basement, behind a cable modem with a single IP.
Through portforwarding, all these machines could be reached from the
internet.
More people joined in the following years and PullThePlug (PTP) grew out of
Brian's basement and into a dedicated hosting enviroment. Now being run by
a core management team and a lot of volunteers, the games existed on 4
physical machines and a bunch of vserver instances.
To avoid a conflict between the PTP games and Brian's business
(ptptech.com), the community moved from PullThePlug.com to PullThePlug.org.
After a dispute over the PullThePlug.org domain name, PullThePlug.org moved
again to OverTheWire.org around 2006.
At this point, most of the old games were gone and replaced by newer games.
Because of all the turbulence caused by moving domain names and problems
with hosting providers and DDoS attacks, development of new games stalled
out. It took a couple years before the server infrastructure got back on
it's tracks. By this time though, a lot of the crew had moved on to other
things.
In 2010, OTW created its first custom wargame for the French Hackito Ergo
Sum (HES) conference and has been doing that annually ever since: HES2010
and abraxas (HES2011) can be downloaded as VM images, while monxla
(HES2012) can be downloaded as a livecd ISO. Kishi, a custom game for 2013,
will be shared by HES and NSC (No Such Conference, also French) and offered
as a download later on.
In 2012, it became apparent that games from intruded.net went offline and
were staying offline. We were asked to adopt these games and, with the help
of their former administrators, managed to resurrect them all 6 on the OTW
servers: leviathan, narnia, behemoth, utumno, maze and manpage. In addition
, 2 games for complete beginners were developed to lower the barrier for
newcomers. Bandit focuses on the very basics of systems security, and natas
covers serverside websecurity.
Because of relentless DDoS attacks on both the OverTheWire.org and
SmashTheStack.org IRC networks, it was decided in 2012 to link both of them
together into one bigger network, reuniting us with our long lost brothers
and sisters.
This is not the end of the story.
We will keep working on developing new games and maintaining the old ones,
for as long as we can. Several new games are already in development,
covering topics such as kernel exploitation, web-security and others.
Many great hackers started out playing, or at some point regularly visited
the PTP/OTW games.
It's an honor to be part of their lives in this way and it is our hope to
continue to provide this kind of hands-on experience to the next generation
of hackers.
Remember, kids: "Experience is what you get, when you don't get what
you want!"
This looks like a good place to thank some people: andrewg, arcanum, astera
,aton, bk, Brian Gemberling, deadbyte, dusty, gizmore, jduck, joernchen,
kripthor, l3thal, malvina, mercy, morla, mxn, nemo, rainer, samy, everyone
else of #social and probably a ton of people who slip my mind right now <3