The CyberSecurity Club Conducted the First Workshop of the Series Entitled "HACK IT. CTF 101"

​Under the supervision of Security Engineering Lab (SEL), the series of “HACK IT" workshops is launched. The CyberSecurity club conducted the first workshop of the series entitled "HACK IT. CTF 101" which took place on Tuesday, 22nd of January, 2019. Capture the Flag (CTF) workshop is one way of providing cyber security training for the students. The workshop provided a full explanation about CTF competitions. Furthermore, it aims to provide the students with a clear understanding about CTF challenges and acquires them the required skills of forensics techniques. The workshop was designed for beginners in Ethical Hacking as it explained the basic skills of forensics, cryptography and reverse engineering techniques. What is CTF? Capture the Flag (CTF) is one of the famous security competitions around the world. Commonly, it is divided in to two types, Challenge-Solving, and Attack-Defense. The challenge-solving type includes a couple of problems in various categories. For example, Reverse Engineering, Forensic, Cryptography, or Binary. The teams can earn points for every solved problem or exploited vulnerable service. For the attack-defense part, each team has to attack the other competitor teams in order to get their flag and earn points. About the workshop The workshop took around one hour. It started by a brief overview about SEL followed by an introduction about the chosen platform. Eight challenges were solved during the workshop with an approximation of 4 mins for each challenge. The workshop was attended by 39 students from several majors including Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information System, Law, and Architecture. A special thank goes to Ms. Aala Alkhayer, SEL research assistant, for supplying the attending students. Another very special thanks go to our club members, Noura Altwaijri, Araw Alturki, Nora Alqahtani and Sarah AlBaiz who volunteered as teacher assistants during the workshop. At the end of the workshop, the students were asked to give their feedback by filling an exit survey. The workshop exit survey illustrated that the workshop lived up the students' expectation. The majority of the students agreed that the workshop gave them sufficient practice and feedback. ​​ ​