Now that I am fully recovered from getting back from Blackhat and Defcon I am up for writing. I don’t think I slept more than 30 hours that whole week. I thought I told myself I would never do such a crazy thing again after I did that during the Tsunami relief. Ha. I guess that means it might happen again in life. If you haven’t read my previous posts or spoken to me about how my team was in Defcon’s CTF finals, 
. Our final place was 8th out of 9 teams (the tenth team ended up not showing up). http://www.ddtek.biz/ We didn’t take last! Woot! That was the whole goal anyways since it was our first year and none of us has any experience in this style of CTF. It was definitely worth the experience since we learned a lot. Next year we wont have only 8 people (7 sometimes since frank^2 had to give a few presentations). I think we had the least amount of people on our team too. I heard rumor ,which apparently is a fact, that team “Kaist@postech (GoN)” had over 100 people. Those crazy koreans. They were good enough to get first blood at the competition though so I give them much kudos. As for us, we had so many noob mistakes that set us back. We didn’t know that we had 2 ethernet cables that put us inline and a bunch of hardware problems that will not happen next year. Whatever though. No directions, just a here you go. It will be more fun next year (if we place 
and if the competition isn’t screwed up… hint hint ddtek.
So what I took from the whole thing was how awesome it is to steal other peoples exploits. I think that is probably the best thing our team did. We replayed attacks like it was going out of style. The plan was to have a netwitness decoder sitting off of a span port capturing data but that failed since of our noobness. We ended up using the spare nic to make a firewall and put it inline while making pcaps on it. I uploaded all out pcaps and found an assortment of awesome attacks. I should make a few write ups with knx to post on painsec’s blog… Anyways, I learned so much as well as instant parser writing. That saved me a ton. I now have some solid parsers ready for next year to catch our flags from leaving the services.
bNull and I gave a presentation to NoVA hackers with the unofficial title called “Not taking last place.” I think it went well since it seemed to be well received. I guess everyone looks at us like we are really good at hacking now but oh so little do they know. The presentation isn’t worth posting on here since it was mainly for talking points but if there seems to be some interest I can post something on it explaining more.
*EDIT* Here is a write up about Defcon as well as a picture of bNull and me during the competition: http://nationalgeographicassignmentblog.com/2010/08/06/the-hackers-life-my-weekend-at-defcon/
