Positive Hack Days: HackQuest is Completed. Best Reverser is Ready to Start

How much does it take to hack a mobile network?
Is electronic government secure
in the era of WikiLeaks and Anonymous?
Is SCADA hacking a Hollywood fiction
or the nowadays reality?
Internet banking: is there any chance to win
over the fraudsters?
Cyber-crimes, cyber-espionage, cyber-war: where do we draw a borderline?

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

HackQuest is Completed. Best Reverser is Ready to Start

The epic hacking competition PHDays HackQuest has come to an end. The competition was organized by ONsec_Lab. It lasted from May 1 to 13 and drew 1441 participants, 112 of them solved at least one task.

Results
The racing continued right to the last minute. The top three was stable until the end of the contest: JustRelаx, MERRON, Bo0om. However, the sly tactics of capturing flags two minutes before the ending allowed one of the participants, namely karim, to win the contest. Bo0om also captured another flag at the last moment and left MERRON on the fourth place, from which he was overtaken by Yngwie.

So karim, who was the fourth not long before the end of the contest, won by 50 points. JustRelax being the leader throughout the contest took second place. Bo0om came in third.

We’ll keep our promise: 10 participants who showed the best results will get invitations to Positive Hack Days and special T-shirts (1 place — 5 tickets, 2 place — 4 tickets, 3 place — 3 tickets, from 4 to 10 place — 1 ticket per participant). Moreover, the top three participants will get diplomas.

Scoreboard in the Norton Commander style (http://hackquest.phdays.com/results.php):

The top ten:

karim 4780
JustRelax 4730
Bo0oM 4530
Yngwie 3930
MERRON 3830
DarkByte 2920
RDot.Org 2750
Promix17 2730
Dor1s 2550
push 2530

The forum organizers decided to provide an invitation for each of the sixteen participants who scored more than 1,000 points. Here are the lucky men:

Phobo5 2430

dipi shmot 2420
freeoks 2400
movsx 2330
kosmonavt 2330
Samosad 2150
Artemnv 1970
flak 1800
jick 1550
n0ne 1430
victor 1400
daniel 1340
kost 1110
mrbio 1100
Yoda 1070
endragor 1030

Congrats! See you at PHDays III!

Tasks
The task of factorization of RSA 512 bits gained plenty of interest. The winner of the contest is karim from the Bushwhackers team. It took him 190 CPU hours of 20 CPU Intel XEON (32 threads each) to solve the task. By the way, karim is the only one who manage to solve the task.

512 bit prime factorization took 190 CPU hours on 20 Xeons running 32 threads each and cost 456$ #phdays2013 #hackquest //done by Karim
— Andrew Petukhov (@p3tand) 11 мая 2013 г.

Moreover, many participants found the oldbook contest quite entertaining. During the contest, the participants were searching for the oldest book about computer sciences. Due to the publication date of the find, additional points were scored (100 points for every 5 years).

Here are the oldest publications that the participants managed to find:

Svoboda, A., Computing Mechanisms, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949
Murray, F., The Theory of Mathematical Machines, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949

Pictured: JustRelax

Pictured: karim

There is another book that is worth mentioning: Voronov, A., Elements of the Theory of Automatic Control, Moscow, Voenizdat Publishing House, 1954.

Almost half of the participants solved the task of finding out the real name of the ONsec CEO, Vladimir Vorontsov.

The value of the unsolved tasks increased every day, and some difficult tasks were simplified during the contests (sidkf, xlc, LIE TO ME etc.).

Best Reverser
The HackQuest contest completion does not mean you won't be able to fight online with the best hackers from every corner of the world. During Positive Hack Days (May 23 and 24), the Best Reverser competition will be held. Any Internet user will be able to take part in the contest and to demonstrate his or her knowledge in analysis of executable files for Microsoft Windows.

Rules
A specially designed program will be offered. You should generate codes for the program so that the program considers them to be valid. You can use any method that meets the law of the Russian Federation.
The participant who is the first to generate three valid codes and provide the jury with concise description of the process of code generation, will be the winner. It is possible to enter another code after successful validation of the previous one. The participants who accomplished the task following the winner and those who generated one or two codes, will take a prize-winning place according to the jury's decision.

The winner will receive AR.Drone 2.0.

Participation Terms
The competition is open for any Internet user. You can register on the PHDays website, from the moment the forum starts. The contest will be held for two days, during the forum. The winner should provide contact information (name, telephone, e-mail) or be present at the awards ceremony to receive his or her award.

Technical Details
The participants can use all the necessary equipment they have at their disposal.

You can find more information about the contests and awards on the PHDays official website.