Why your business needs to join our thrilling upcoming CTF

Industry leaders like Electronic Arts, Intel, and Siemens love Hack The Box’s training platform for business. We give their employees hands-on, gamified hacker training, to help them prepare for the ever evolving cyber threat landscape. And Capture The Flag games are one of the many types of activities we host all year round. CTF competitions challenge your talent to think like a hacker as they use their wits and creativity to find metaphorical flags hidden in a computer network or application. Read all about CTFs on our blog.

So we want you to know that we have a new CTF coming up on July 23rd to 25th. It’s 54 hours of hacking training. And this CTF is custom designed for business. We’re so excited about our first business-only CTF!

Registration to our Business CTF 2021 is free of charge. Assemble a team, designate a team captain, and sign up on our website while you still have time. July 16th is the deadline for registration.

 

 

Here’s what you can expect

If you want the full experience, join us as we kick off a series of pre-event talks on July 22nd, streaming via YouTube. Our Senior Community Manager Sotiria Giannitsari (@r0adrunn3r) will explain what we have planned for our CTF. And she’ll talk about our £20,000 worth of prizes too! Our Training Director Dimitrios Bougioukas will discuss our HTB Academy for business, another way your employees can sharpen their cybersecurity skills while having fun. Our Head of Training Development Ben Rollin (@mrb3n) will explain how your business can prepare for penetration testing with HTB Academy. 

Our Director of Operations Nikos Fountas will show you how you can add to your cybersecurity team by recruiting through Hack The Box. Sotiria Giannitsari (@r0adrunn3r) returns to discuss corporate Capture The Flag training and team building. Customer Success Manager Thomas Williams will run a business interview panel, showing how you can keep your cybersecurity team’s skills sharp through the unprecedented challenge of the global pandemic. The panel features Michael Skowrunski (Microsoft Federal), Joel Cedersjö (NTT Ltd), and Daniel Astor (Security Risk Advisors). Our Business Development Manager Katerina Tasiopoulou will talk about cyber attack simulation and assessment labs. And then we’ll finish the day as our Head of Content Innovation Ian Austin talks about cloud security.

So July 23rd kicks off our first Business CTF. It features real-world cyber threat scenarios, the latest vulnerabilities, and state-of-the-art attack techniques. Our flags are strategically hidden to offer a challenge for players with a variety of cyber offensive skill levels. Our fierce CTF playground features two Windows machines, two Linux machines, and two Active Directory servers.

If your employees need to keep up-to-date with their certifications, our business CTF is a great opportunity for them. Team members who conquer at least fourteen challenges will receive six (ISC)² CPEs. And everyone who scores at least 200 points over the course of the weekend will receive a Certificate of Attendance.

Let’s talk about prizes. If your team ranks between 1st and 5th place, you will receive Hak5 gift cards, Synack swag box, HackerOne swag, HTB swag, Pro Labs, Advanced Dedicated Labs, and HTB Academy for Business modules. Full prize details are on our website. 

On July 25th, the CTF will be over! Cross your fingers and hope your team ranked in our top five. Relax, you worked hard and played even harder!

Then on July 26th, it’s time to be proud of what your team has accomplished. We will host a winners ceremony on our Twitch channel, and everyone’s welcome to attend. We will reveal our amazing secret trophy, have live music and another surprise! Stay tuned!

 

Interview with @r0adrunn3r

Sotiria Giannitsari (@r0adrunn3r) has been working hard behind the scenes, getting our upcoming first annual Business CTF ready to go. I asked her some questions about the event for some firsthand insight.

Kim Crawley (@crowgirl): How is our first Business CTF different from Capture The Flag events we’ve hosted before?

r0adrunn3r: This time, we are inviting all companies of the world, all cybersecurity and IT teams, to compete with each other, train on amazing hacking content, and at the end, win amazing prizes offered by us and our event supporters. 

What we are also doing differently is the content. This hacking competition is not “CTF-y,” but based on real-life attacks and scenarios, and for the first time we are including cloud hacking. From web to Active Directory, Windows hacking, to Linux, cloud, pwn, reversing, forensics and cryptography, this CTF will blow your mind! 

Last but not least, the prizes. We have more than £20,000 worth of prizes, including swag by Synack, HTB, Hacker One, Hak5, and premium HTB Hacking Training Services. And also a secret trophy that will make the winning team feel like a world champion. It is going to be 1337! When we said hacking is the new gaming, we were not kidding. And we want to make cybersecurity training for companies fun, engaging, and rewarding.

 

crowgirl: How do companies benefit from participating in our upcoming Business CTF?

r0adrunn3r: As mentioned before, the hacking content will be based on real-life attacks and scenarios. The techniques that are going to be used, and the knowledge acquired during the event is going to make any cybersecurity professional a pro! 

Hack The Box formed a team of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on each topic, Windows, Linux and AD Hacking, Web, Cloud, Pwn, Reversing, Forensics, and Cryptography. Each topic will have fun, and at the same time 100% exciting hacking content and attack techniques you need to be familiar with. Players will be challenged from easy to hard challenges, and will be required to put basic attack tactics into practice, to do research, and think outside the box. A must have cybersecurity training event, all in 54 hours. It would be a shame to miss it, and a hacking party to remember!

 

crowgirl: Is our CTF good for non-tech companies too?

r0adrunn3r: Of course! We will have content that is easy and go gradually, to more complex concepts. So everyone has a place in the CTF. As long as you are passionate about information security, the biggest requirement to attend the event is covered. The rest will come! Also, many companies have joined our Discord server to exchange ideas, tips, and start preparing for the event. So if you are new to this, join us here: https://discord.gg/hackthebox.

 

crowgirl: Is our Business CTF appropriate for employees who have never participated in a CTF before?

r0adrunn3r: Yes, it is. The hacking content available for players is based 100% on real-life attack scenarios, state-of-the-art technologies, and concepts that they will face in their day-to-day work engagements. But in a more fun and, as always, gamified way. Therefore we recommend it to all professionals that are ready to put into use their custom exploits and tools and, who knows, build new ones that will help them in their future work!

 

So, what are you waiting for?

Over 220 teams registered during the first ten days. You still have time to join. Your IT team can sign up by 16 July 2021. Let’s get started!