A while ago, No Starch Press generously donated to PPP some of their awesome book releases in computer security!

Introduction

One of PPP’s favorite competitions is CSAW, mostly because it gives us an excuse to go to New York City if we qualify, but also because it was one of the first competitions that PPP won back in 2009 when it started. So, of course, in late September PPP competed in the CSAW qualification round. This year we put together 3 undergraduate teams: PPP{1,2,3} and 1 graduate team PPP5. We had both veterans and new recruits play this year.

After winning iCTF and Codegate, PPP had already prequalified for Defcon19. Of course, we couldn’t be lamers so we also qualified through the normal prequal round (which makes us the first team to ever triple qualify for Defcon).

On May 18th, PPP was in Moscow playing in the Positive Hack Days CTF competition. This competition was organized by Positive Technologies, a computer security firm located in Russia. Andrew, Brian, David, Ricky, and Tyler traveled to Russia to participate in the challenge.

As you all know by now, PPP recently hosted its own CTF competition called PlaidCTF. This was a great chance for our team to take all the problems we wished we found in other competitions and force other people to solve them. We had an awesome time putting problems together for people to solve, and we’d like to think it turned out pretty well.

As you may remember, PPP qualified this year for the annual Korean Codegate competition. This is one of the most popular CTF competitions in the world, which made it an impressive feat to even make it to the final round for a second time.

In case you haven’t heard, we’re hosting our own CTF competition in about one month. We’re going to have prizes sponsored by Lockheed Martin, so you should definitely sign up if you haven’t already.

This weekend we participated in the qualification round for one of the largest international computer security competitions, Codegate.

Just got back from ShmooCon and it seems that some people want a writeup for the taped challenge. I highly encourage you to try it yourself first, because once you see the bug, it takes away some of the fun.