Day7-Bsides DEFCON and Recovering

⊛ August 15, 2023

I used to think the 3-2-1 rule was a joking suggestion, but after DEFCON I very much realized that it’s not. I spent most of the day still recovering from DEFCON/BSides and my week in Vegas. I learned a TON and got to talk to a bunch of great people. For me the most impactful and educational experiences were talking with people that I ran into, but also the panels that share experiences and lessons learned from hard fought battles and processes. The community is incredibly valuable to me and I love my hacker peeps so much, working together on CTFs only reinforced it.

My VERY summarized writeup of the ONCD Badge CTF is:

  1. Hashes posted on ONCD Twitter
  2. Hashes go into Virus Total, both point to 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy
  3. One of the 2023 NCS has an encryption key associated with it
  4. The encryption key is base64
  5. The base64 gets a cipher text
  6. The cipher text is a Viginere cipher that you have to get the correct key for 7 With the correct key, you get the passphrase that led to the badge

I love BSides, I love DEFCON, I love SecKC, and I love the hacker community.