picoCTF to hold 2020 Mini Competition in October

Competitive hackers, get ready.

In celebration of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, picoCTF will be holding a mini competition during the month of October. The competition will consist of series of cybersecurity challenges of intermediate difficulty in the topics of reverse engineering, forensics, web, and binary exploitation problems.

“We’ve been listening to previous picoCTF participants who keep saying, ‘We want more competitions,’” says Megan Kearns, picoCTF’s project manager. “The 2020 Mini Competition gives competitive hackers, as well as those who are learning another opportunity to test and compare their skills with one another outside of picoCTF’s normal competition, which will occur in March 2021.”

We’ve been listening to previous picoCTF participants who keep saying, ‘We want more competitions.’

Megan Kearns, Project Manager, picoCTF

The picoCTF 2020 Mini Competition begins at 12 p.m. ET October 1 and ends at 3 p.m. ET Saturday, October 30. To register, participants must first create a picoCTF account and then register for the mini competition.

Participants of the mini competition will be able to see how they stack up against other competitors via a global scoreboard. Prizes will be awarded to the first 20 eligible participants who solve a single challenge, as well as the first 20 eligible participants who solve all of the challenges.

“We believe that participants will gain valuable skills and experience even if they solve just a single challenge,” says Hanan Hibshi, a faculty advisor to picoCTF and a research and teaching scientist in the Information Networking Institute. “Solving all of the challenges will be something participants should be extremely proud of.”

We believe that participants will gain valuable skills and experience even if they solve just a single challenge.

Hanan Hibshi, faculty advisor to picoCTF and a research and teaching scientist in the Information Networking Institute, picoCTF

At the conclusion of the 2020 Mini Competition, the challenges will move to the picoGYM—a new feature within the picoCTF platform that houses challenges from previous competitions, giving aspiring hackers access to more educational resources to practice and hone their skills in a non-competitive “gym”-like environment.

picoCTF is a free online cybersecurity education platform and competition that was initially launched in 2013 by cybersecurity experts in Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab. Over the past seven years, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have participated in its competitions, and tens of thousands of teachers have used picoCTF as an educational tool to help teach their students skills in cybersecurity.

The picoCTF 2020 Mini Competition has been made possible by a generous sponsorship from Google.