Platform HASBL CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Medium) OS Jeopardy — Crypto (Python + C) Tags Modular multiplicative bijections, modular-inverse tables, permutation reversal, debug-print leakage exploitation, Galois LFSR + htonl endianness pitfalls, classic VIC cipher (straddling checkerboard + chain-addition keystream + special-character word substitution) HASBL CTF 2026 is a multi-category jeopardy event with Reverse Engineering, Pwn, Web, and Forensics tracks. This writeup is dedicated to the Crypto track — the six crypto challenges (baby-counting-fingers, baby-learns-obfuscation, baby-learns-walking, script-kiddie, head-team, VIC) were all solved, and each one teaches a different applied-cryptography primitive: modular multiplicative bijections on Z_n, two-layer permutation-plus-multiplication ciphers, position-salted chained byte operations, debug-print leakage of an otherwise elaborate matrix cipher, dual Galois LFSRs ruined by an htonl endianness asymmetry, and a faithful textbook implementation of the Soviet VIC hand-cipher with straddling checkerboard and chain-addition keystream. ...

Platform HASBL CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Medium) OS Jeopardy — Forensics (Linux toolchain) Tags QR-code decoding with Reed-Solomon tolerance, JPEG metadata extraction (EXIF, COM, XMP), base64/base32 encoding fingerprints, bit-stream-to-JPEG reconstruction, magic-byte surgical repair, file-header recognition HASBL CTF 2026 is a multi-category jeopardy event with Reverse Engineering, Pwn, Web, and Forensics tracks. This writeup is dedicated to the Forensics track — the five forensics challenges (Quick Response, Logo, Digits, our sweet cat, Pamuk, and The Magic of "Magic Numbers") were all solved, and each one teaches a different file-forensics primitive: QR-code decoding despite a visual overlay, JPEG metadata extraction across EXIF and COM segments, bit-stream-to-JPEG byte reconstruction, base64-wrapped JPEG with hex content, and surgical magic-byte repair plus XMP metadata walking. ...

Platform HASBL CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Medium) OS Jeopardy — Pwn (Linux x86-64) Tags ret2win with movaps stack alignment, int16 signed overflow, mmap RWX shellcode injection, register-controlled jmp into pre-built gadget chain, classic ROP with SysV-ABI argument-register setup, pwntools payload construction, checksec mitigation analysis HASBL CTF 2026 is a multi-category jeopardy event with Reverse Engineering, Pwn, Web, and Forensics tracks. This writeup is dedicated to the Pwn track — the five pwn challenges (baby-bufferoverflow, candy-store, baby-shellcoder, jumper, padawan-pwn) were all solved, and each one teaches a different beginner-to-intermediate binary-exploitation primitive: ret2win with the movaps 16-byte stack-alignment trap, a signed-vs-unsigned integer-width bug exploitable via menu interaction, direct shellcode execution on an mmap’d RWX page, a 7-byte shellcode budget that has to set rdx for a hard-coded jmp rdx into the binary’s own gadget chain, and a full ROP chain that loads three argument registers before calling a flag-printing function. ...

Platform HASBL CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Medium) OS Jeopardy — Reverse Engineering Tags Go binary triage, static-only flag recovery, PE anti-debug bypass (PEB.BeingDebugged, x64dbg process scan, NtCreateThreadEx), custom binary protocol parsing, game-logic reverse engineering HASBL CTF 2026 is a multi-category jeopardy event covering Reverse Engineering, Pwn, Web, and Forensics. This writeup is dedicated to the Reverse Engineering track — the four rev challenges (baby-go, DebugMe, Pr0t0c0l1337, PamukTheCat) were all solved, and each one teaches a different reverse-engineering skill: static-only recognition on a Go binary with debug symbols, anti-debug bypass on a Windows PE, custom binary-protocol parsing on a Linux PIE, and game-logic reverse engineering on a JRPG-shaped crackme. ...

Platform THEM?! CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Hard) OS Jeopardy (Reverse, Crypto) Tags CHIP-8 emulation, x86-64 PE reverse engineering, Unicorn dynamic emulation, FNV-1a hash recovery, custom bytecode VMs, control-flow flattening, DES weak-key parity, XOR-chain cryptanalysis, modular arithmetic over 10^155 THEM?! CTF 2026 is a large jeopardy event with 85 total challenges across the usual categories. This writeup covers the seven challenges I personally solved, all from the reverse-engineering and cryptography tracks — every one demanded a real RE or cryptanalytic technique end-to-end. The reverse picks range from a CHIP-8 ROM that paints its flag onto a 64×32 screen across ~2⁴⁰ encoder steps per round, to a Windows binary whose VM mutates its own register state during dispatch. The crypto picks are the same shape — three challenges that look obscure on the surface and reduce to a clean number-theory or XOR-algebra invariant once you read carefully. ...

Platform BYUCTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Hard) OS Jeopardy (Crypto, Forensics, Reverse, Web) Tags Coppersmith small-roots, multi-prime RSA, Euler totient tower reduction, YARA constraint solving, NTP/ICMP/HTTP pcap forensics, Go reverse engineering, Python prototype pollution, CSP bypass BYUCTF 2026 is Brigham Young University’s annual capture-the-flag, hosted on the Cyber Jousting infrastructure (chals.cyberjousting.com). The 2026 edition runs fifteen challenges across four classic jeopardy categories — Crypto, Forensics, Reverse, and Web — with a heavy Portal-flavoured forensics arc starring GLaDOS, Wheatley, and the cake-is-a-lie ICMP/NTP/HTTP capture. ...

Platform Hackastra CTF 2026 Difficulty Mixed (Easy → Hard) OS Jeopardy (Web, Crypto, Reverse, Misc, Forensics) Tags JWT, RS256/HS256 confusion, DSA known-nonce, Coppersmith, Feistel inversion, ARM64/x86_64 RE, WASM RE, AWS Cognito, blind SQLi, XSS, LSB stego Hackastra CTF 2026 ran as a jeopardy-style competition on CTFtime (event #3270) with fifteen challenges spanning reverse engineering, web exploitation, cryptography, forensics, and miscellaneous infrastructure bugs. The event’s name plays on the Sanskrit word अस्त्र (astra, meaning “weapon” or “missile”), and the challenges live up to it — every flag in this set rewards a specific, named technique rather than rote tooling. ...

If your environment still runs Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) — and most large enterprises that adopted federation between 2015 and 2020 still do — you are sitting on the single highest-value target in your identity stack. An attacker who extracts the ADFS token-signing certificate can mint SAML tokens for any user, including domain admins, with no further AD interaction and no Kerberos or NTLM tickets to detect. That class of attack is Golden SAML, and it’s exactly what hit SolarWinds-era victims in 2020. This is the practical ADFS security hardening guide for 2026: rotating signing certificates, auditing claim rules, enforcing Extranet Lockout, blocking the mimikatz / ADFSDump extraction path, and the migration path to Microsoft Entra ID for the eventual decommission. ...

A honeypot is a security resource whose value lies entirely in being attacked. It looks like a legitimate target — a database, an admin account, a file share, a misconfigured cloud key — but in reality it has no legitimate users, no real data, and one job: when someone touches it, raise an alarm. The first interaction is the alarm, and that’s why honeypots routinely deliver detection in minutes for techniques that signature-based EDR misses entirely. This guide answers what is a computer honeypot in 2026, walks through the practical taxonomy (low- vs high-interaction, production vs research), and shows the deployment patterns and SIEM integration that actually catch attackers rather than wasting blue-team time. ...

If an attacker compromises a single endpoint in your environment and finds a reused local Administrator password, they own every other workstation that shares it. That single misconfiguration is how a phishing click on one helpdesk laptop becomes a 4,000-endpoint ransomware incident — and it’s exactly what Windows LAPS (Local Administrator Password Solution) was built to prevent. This is the complete step-by-step Windows LAPS implementation guide for enterprise environments in 2026: AD schema preparation, KDS root key generation, encrypted password storage, Group Policy reference, PowerShell administration, and the full DSRM password backup workflow for Domain Controllers. ...