Getting Started with CTF Competitions

What is a CTF?

A Capture The Flag competition is a hacker-style puzzle hunt. Each puzzle exposes a small "flag" string (typically formatted like CTF{...}). Submit it to score points.

The categories you'll meet

• Web — find auth bypasses, SSRF, prototype pollution, weird parsers.
• Crypto — break broken cryptography. Not implementing AES from scratch.
• Pwn — exploit memory corruption in C binaries. Bring pwntools.
• Reverse engineering — figure out what an opaque binary does.
• Forensics — dig artefacts out of pcaps, disk images, memory dumps.

A useful first stack

• picoCTF — best on-ramp; everything is solvable.
• HackTheBox — great for ongoing practice.
• OverTheWire — Linux + networking fundamentals.

How to actually start

1. Pick a type you find fun and ignore the rest for the first month.
2. Read writeups before attempting puzzles in that category — pattern recognition beats raw IQ here.
3. Join a team. CTFs are 4–10× more fun with people who know things you don't.
4. Keep a personal cheat sheet of techniques. The same tricks recur every event.

Tip: don't grind challenges you can't solve. Read three writeups, take a nap, then try a fresh one.