On 7th-8th November 2024, the Cybersecurity Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics Faculty of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv organized the second international CTF competition in a partnership with a number of foreign higher education institutions and Ukrainian companies and organizations: National Cybersecurity Coordination Center of National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine; Halmstad University, Sweden; Rowan University, USA; Association of Cybersecurity Specialists; Cyber Defense Academy; OWASP Lviv chapter, etc. The sponsors of these competitions were the following IT companies: Softserve, Leobit, Botscrew, 501 company, etc.
Capture the Flag (CTF) is a cybersecurity competition where teams of participants test their skills by finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them to obtain hidden pieces of information, called “flags”. Each “flag” is worth a certain number of points based on the challenge`s difficulty. The team that scores the most points by capturing the flags successfully wins.
The competition was held in a hybrid format. Most contestants participated in online format. There were registered: 106 participants; 36 teams (https://lvivctf.lnu.edu.ua). The competition was attended by high school students, students of specialties related to cybersecurity and any other specialty who are passionate about cybersecurity. Contestants solved tasks to counter hybrid cyber threats on the following topics (66 challenges): OWASP, MITRE, OSINT, standards, steganography, encryption, secure programming, reverse engineering, debugging, optimization, signal processing and others.
The competition was attended by participants from a wide geography and level of knowledge, from experienced representatives of Halmstad University Engineering to students of domestic educational institutions: State University of Information and Communication Technologies (partially off-line), Lviv State University of Life Safety, Uzhhorod National University, Khmelnytskyi National University, National University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute” and others. The first places were taken by students of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, the third places went to representatives of Halmstad University and Kharkiv Polytechnic University. All participants of the top ten deserve high marks and showed the highest level of knowledge in the field of cybersecurity and information protection. The table of results is presented below:
We are grateful to everyone who helped organize this event. We congratulate all participants and prize-winners of the CTF competition. Our team of the Cybersecurity Department not only managed to hold the competition at the proper level with every effort, but also, together with our partners, took care of prizes and gifts for the prize-winners of the competition thanks to our sponsors. The awarding of the winners took place at the Museum of Computer Technologies of our university, where an interesting and exciting excursion was held for all those present.
