Teams from 117 countries demonstrated ethical hacking skills in CTFZone 2023

Hackers from Russia, China, Czechia, France, Indonesia, and South Korea made it to the finals. Four of the finalists belong to the world’s top 10 CTF teams

August 15, 2023

August 12–13 saw the online qualifiers of the ethical hacking competition CTFZone. Organized by BI.ZONE, the tournament brought together 1,326 teams from 117 countries. Among the participants were 172 teams from Russia, 134 from Indonesia, 118 from China, 84 from the United States, and 78 from Vietnam.

Following the qualifiers, the top 10 teams will meet again in the online finals in November. The winner takes home $10,000. The second and third best teams are awarded with 5,000 and 3,000 dollars, respectively.

CTF (Capture the Flag) is a competition that assesses participants’ problem‑solving skills, such as defending and attacking computer systems and finding and remediating vulnerabilities. BI.ZONE has hosted such tournaments since 2016.

In this year’s qualifiers, the teams had to solve 26 tasks in 7 categories, including sport programming, vulnerability exploitation, forensics, cryptography, and others. One of the tasks required to neutralize a malicious file on a compromised computer. In another task, the contestants had to decrypt a message sent via a secure Signal‑based messenger.

We regularly host CTFZone contests. They help participants not just maintain and improve their skills but also gain new knowledge in a dynamic competitive format. The contests have no strict boundaries and criteria—anyone with the right set of skills can join, regardless of their country of residence. Many BI.ZONE specialists have experience competing in CTFZone. This helped them additionally prepare to dealing with real‑world cyberattacks

Evgeny Voloshin

Head of Security Assessment and Antifraud, BI.ZONE