Use Facebook’s Capture the Flag Platform to Test Your Hacking Skills and Learn Cybersecurity
Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions educate participants in information security and technical skills, including things like encryption and reverse engineering. Facebook recently launched its own open source CTF platform for you to test and develop your hacking skills.
According to a Facebook blog post:
The current set of issues includes reverse engineering, forensics, web application security, cryptography, and binaries. You can also create your own challenges for use with Facebook’s platform for individual competition.
Not only can CTFs teach more technical skills than you get in an average computer science program, they can also help you break into the security industry. When I started looking for full-time jobs, I found that security interviews were very similar to CTF tasks, which helped me showcase my technical skills – and I was able to make an impact from day one.
To install the platform ( source code on GitHub ), you need Ubuntu 14.04. CTF Facebook will take care of the maps, team registration and scoring. Hacking competitions can include from two to several hundred participants, both locally and online.
Schools, student groups, and others who lack the resources to host their own CTF sessions are likely to find this resource valuable. If you are a member of Capture the Flag, you will learn about exploits and, most importantly, how to defend against these attacks.
Facebook CTF is now open source! | Facebook via ZDNet