What: The biggest hacking competition ever!  25 teams from Universities around
the world compete against each other in a security challenge called
'International Capture The Flag', or 'iCTF'.

Who: 25 teams from Universities in USA, Europe, and Australia 

USA 

UCSB, Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, University of South
Florida, Tampa, University of California at Davis, Georgia Tech, North
Carolina State University, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, University of
Colorado at Colorado Springs, University of Nebraska (NUCIA), Omaha,
Pennsylvania State University, University of Texas at Austin

Europe

Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, RWTH Aachen University, Germany,
Supelec, France, University of Regensburg, Germany, Technical University of
Vienna, Austria, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Universita' degli Studi di
Milano, Italy, University of Hamburg, Germany, Technische Universitaet Berlin,
Germany, University of Mannheim, Germany, Ural's State University, Russia

Australia
	
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane

When/Where: Friday, December 8th, from 10:00am - 4:00pm, Frank Hall, Ground
Floor near GSL/CISL (follow the noise)

More Info: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~vigna/CTF

Description:

An international contest including multiple teams from the United States,
Europe, and Australia will be held on Friday 12/08/06, 10am - 4pm, at the
Department of Computer Science of UCSB.

The contest, (known as "Capture The Flag") is a distributed, wide-area
security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of students from
both the attack and defense viewpoints. This is the 5th edition of the
security exercise, and its largest version.

Each team is given an Internet server that provides a number of services. The
services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been
included by the contest organizers.

The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and
uncompromised throughout the contest phase, by finding the vulnerabilities and
fixing them in their own copy of the server.  The teams will also leverage the
vulnerabilities they found to compromise other teams' servers.

During the contest, an automated scoring system keeps track, for each team, of
what services are available, and which services have been compromised (that
is, "who is hacking who"). Points are assigned to the teams according to their
ability to defend their systems and successfully compromise the systems of
other teams.

This unique international exercise involves teams at different universities,
spread across the US, Europe, and Australia competing simultaneously.  This is
the largest competition of this kind ever attempted.  Other similar contests
are usually held in a single physical location and/or involve a small number
of teams.

The event will be based in the Frank Hall, adjacent to the GSL/CISL and is
hosted by Dr. Giovanni Vigna, Department of Computer Science, College of
Engineering.