We’re back at it with another CTF writeup. As now I’m a working professional, I’m eligible to take part in the HTB Global Cyber Skill Benchmark 2025 under Team ProCheckUp. In this CTF, we were placed 141/796 within the competition. It’s actually quite impressive, considering only like 5 of us are playing the CTF. I had the the chance to solve challenges of different categories (ML,RE,Forensics,ICS,Crypto) but I won’t be covering everything in this writeup. Here are some of the challenges I found interestingly fun.

As I found that EQCTF platform has been widely used by local CTF players, and was supported by local universities for module lessons and skills enhancement purposes, I think its only fair that a blog post explaining why the infamous platform was created.

Wargames is an annual year end CTF organized by WGMY team from Malaysia. This year, they bring in some special categories: Post Quantum Crptography, Block Chain, as well as Game Pwn. I did not solve the first 2 categories, but i manage to have fun and find the flag for one of the Game Pwn Challenges - World 1.

SherpaCTF 2024 was the only CTF that I had joined in 2024, and to my surprise, also my first 24 hours on-site CTF. Being a graduate had decreased the opportunity for me participate in physical CTFs, but finally Sherpasec had given me one CTF to play this year. The organizers of this CTF is the members from Sherpasec community, which consists of students, fresh graduates, and also seasoned experts. Aside from that, the challenge creators team are built from seasoned players that had mad experience, some are the challenge creators of wargames.my, and some of them are crazy talented students, and every single one of them created challenges based on their expertise. It was one of the most challenging and fun CTF that I had joined!

So, I haven’t been playing HTB for quite sometime, and I finally had some motivation (or mood) to try out some boxes. So here is my writeup for the HTB seasonal machine: PermX.

This year, wargames is filled with very interesting challenges. As for this miscellaneous challenge - Splice, it’s a more lighthearted challenge as compared to the other brain-cells consuming challenges. The challenge is to recover 2 QR code that are removed at the middle of the QR image.

CTF or capture the flag is a hacking competition that participants race against time to solve as many challenges and gain as much points to win. There are mainly 2 types of CTF, Jeopardy-Style in which is the traditional challenge solving CTF, or Attack-and-Defence Style that competitors will hack into each other’s system while patching their own vulnerable systems.