As someone who has participated in numerous Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions, I was excited when Huntress Lab announced their CTF late last year. Anytime a new organization ventures into hosting CTFs, it brings fresh perspectives, twists, and innovative approaches to data manipulation to obtain flags.
I found their daily-released challenges to be particularly engaging. To rank high, participants had to swiftly complete all challenges. While other CTFs focus on different aspects, like Flare-On which emphasizes malware reverse engineering, Huntress Lab's CTF encompassed a wide range of Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) tasks. This included dealing with malware, forensic analysis, log examination, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), recent emerging threats, and manipulation of live systems.
Many challenges involved datasets that are seldom addressed in other competitions. There were fewer challenges centered around random cryptography, key generation, or website attacks, and more focused on parsing large, unknown data structures and analyzing the results.
