Member-only story

Beginner’s Guide to CTFs

How To Start With Security Capture The Flag Competitions

Vickie Li
InfoSec Write-ups
6 min readMar 19, 2020

Security CTFs, or Capture The Flag competitions, are a great way to learn how to hack. They are competitions where competitors compete to try to find a “flag” to prove that they have hacked into a system.

Why do CTFs?

They are one of the best ways to learn specific security skills, like binary exploitation, web exploitation or reverse engineering.

And since you often play CTFs in teams, CTFs are also a great way to make friends with likeminded security nerds. There are many collegiate-level CTFs where you can compete with fellow students, and you’ll find that many practicing security professionals play CTFs as well.

Finally, CTFs train your hacker persistence. The CTF experience of getting stuck in a challenge, persist and finally finding a solution models real-life hacking scenarios. CTFs teach you to remain patient and optimistic when you are stuck hacking.

Types of CTFs

There are two main types of CTFs: Jeopardy-style and Attack-Defense-style.

Jeopardy-style CTFs are essentially a list of hacking challenges that you can complete for flags that are worth a certain number of points. These challenges involve…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Published in InfoSec Write-ups

A collection of write-ups from the best hackers in the world on topics ranging from bug bounties and CTFs to vulnhub machines, hardware challenges and real life encounters. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for the coolest infosec updates: https://weekly.infosecwriteups.com/

Written by Vickie Li

Professional investigator of nerdy stuff. Hacks and secures. Creates god awful infographics. https://twitter.com/vickieli7

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Very helpful!

--