Back in May we participated in Defcon 18. This is of course the most well known CTF competition around, so we were all pretty excited. At 55 hours, Defcon was also the longest competition we have participated in so far.

Unfortunately, our team is made up entirely of students, and so by the time Defcon started, many of the members of PPP were on vacation and unable to participate with us. Still, after we figured out how to use the submission system correctly, we quickly started racking up some points.

There were a lot of very interesting problems (as well as lots of strange references to sheep and donkeys), and we had an great time solving the problems. There were a lot of very interesting forensics and trivia problems that were much different from anything we had seen before. The final scoreboard (after some adjustments by the organizers due to erroneous submissions) was

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 1.  Underminers                              |  7100
 2.  European Nopsled Team                    |  7100
 3.  TwoSixNine                               |  7000
 4.  Uberminers                               |  7000
 5.  lollersk8erz                             |  6700
 6.  GoN                                      |  6500
 7.  painsec                                  |  6400
 8.  ACME Pharm                               |  6400
 9.  Routards                                 |  6300
10.  Nibbles                                  |  6200
11.  shellphish                               |  6100
12.  teamebfe                                 |  6100
13.  Plaid Parliament of Pwning               |  5900

We ended up being alternates, in case some of the teams did not show up in Las Vegas for the finals. Although we wanted to participate in the final round, we did not hear until far too late that there was a spot open for us, and so we were not able to make it.

In the end, we still had a great time participating, and now that we know what to expect from Defcon, next year we can do even better.