A team of 10 CSC undergraduate students, known as the W0lf H4ck3r5, recently participated in the annual UCSB International Capture the Flag Contest (also known as the iCTF).

 

The iCTF is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, with the goal of testing the security skills of the participants from both the attack and defense viewpoints.

 

The contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.

 

The CSC students competed from the Friday Institute on Centennial Campus.

 

Each team is given a server which contains a Windows and a Linux host system. The goal of the contest is to keep the server from  going down due to viruses, malware or other computer security threats, by fixing any vulnerability the servers and/or hosts have. In addition, teams are encouraged to add vulnerabilities to other servers in the competition, in order to improve their chances of winning.

 

"Security is an ever changing and growing field. This competition is important because it allows students to experience the multifaceted challenges that security engineers face on a daily basis, where more than just virtual banks and virtual computer systems are on the line”, says Sina Barham, a senior in Computer Science and W0lf H4ck3r5 team member.

 

The contest, which originated in 2003, has grown from a few U.S. colleges and universities, to an international competition featuring schools from North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. It is the first known international simultaneous computer security competitions.

 

NC State has fielded a team in the event every year since the competition started.