THE INTRO

It's 9am and somebody is franticly knocking on your door...

You open the door and Jack Bauer is right there on your doorstep looking at
you with spirited eyes. He screams "Somebody set up us the bomb!"

You don't understand and reply: "What you say!", and then you slap Jack
several times to get him out of his hysteric blubbering. After a few seconds
he seems to regain control and starts talking...

"There is a nuclear device that is going to explode unless we stop it. We have
only seven hours, until 4pm PST. The bomb has been set by a terrorist group
called Softerror.com. We have been watching them for months. We knew they were
up to something big. But we never would have imagined something of this size."

You are still incredulous and ask: "So what do you want from me?"

Jack says: "The bomb can only be stopped by breaking into the Softerror.com
network and neutralizing the program that will detonate the bomb. I heard that
you participated in hacking competitions at UCSB and proved to be a l33t
h4x0r. Now it's time to prove it for real! You need to stop the bomb!"

Without waiting another second, you rush in front of your custom-order
desktop machine, which has been loaded with all sorts of attack tools and
start typing. You ask: "So what information do we have?" Jack replies: We know
very little. These guys have a public web site, at the address
X.X.X.X. Nobody has been able to penetrate that. There are rumors that behind
the web site there are several different networks, one for the development of
cyber-terror tools, one to handle their financial data, and one where the bomb
has been set. But we don't know much about these networks: You are our only
hope!"

"Where do you get your information", you ask.

"We have several sources inside and outside Softerror.com. However we have to 
pay a lot of money for everu little piece of information. These guys are 
greedy bastards!," Jack answers, his voice starting to sound hopeless.

You stare at your browser and you type in the address that Jack gave you. You
know that this is only the beginning....

THE RULES

This year's iCTF is a completely new competition.  We have created for you 40
replicas of the Softerror.com network. Each team has access to one of the
replicas. Your task is to break into the Softerror.com network and stop the
bomb from exploding. Nobody will be attacking you. You will not have to patch
your services. You will just have to penetrate the network and reach the
server that is running the bomb's timer, and figure out a way to stop the
timer.

You will be given an initial pool of points, which you can increase by
answering the side challenges that we have prepared for you.  The challenges
are available at http://X.X.X.X.  You can also get bragging points by
sending us your exploits, which demonstrate your l33tness. Exploits can be
uploaded here: http://X.X.X.X.

You can trade some of your points for hints from insiders within
Softerror.com.  The more expensive the hints, the more helpful they
are. This can be very useful if you are stuck somewhere in the network.  The
hints are accessible here: http://X.X.X.X.

The network is monitored by both signature-based and anomaly-based intrusion
detection systems. Whenever your activity is detected (no matter what type of
activity you are carrying out) you lose points. Therefore, try to be stealthy,
or at least not too noisy.

The winner of the competition is the team that has completed the challenge
(and stopped the bomb) with the most points. Note that if you finish first,
you don't get any special kudos. You will have to wait until the end to see
who is the one with the most points...

A semi-real-time scoring system is available at http://X.X.X.X.

This is a first time for us in setting a system like this. It required an
enormous amount of work and resources. Please help us in running this
competition in a smooth fashion and be patient if something goes wrong.  We
have tested the system, but we don't know what you guys are going to do (and
usually you come up with some crazy stuff).

The following are a set of rules:

0) We might create rules on the fly, if we need to do so. :-)

1) Do not break stuff permanently. In the original CTF you could just reboot
your VMware machine. In this case, if you screw up your target, your target
STAYS SCREWED. This might even mean that you are out of the competition (e.g.,
if you make a mistake and change the routing system or a firewall rule).
Therefore, be careful. Also, services might run as root (you will have to
break root in most cases anyway). Make sure you know what you are doing.  If
you are really stuck, please contact us (ctf-admin@lists.cs.ucsb.edu), but we
cannot guarantee that we can recover from the damage.

2) Do not perform DOS attacks or spoofing. No attack requires spoofing your
source address. Spoofing malicious traffic so that other teams are penalized
is considered lame and will be punished with immediate exclusion from the
competition.  Also, the resources that you are using are shared with other
teams (using virtualization), even if you cannot see them. So if you overload
your network, you are making life miserable for everybody else.

We will soon make the IP addresses marked as X.X.X.X available...