/CTF-Notes-Tutorials

CTF Notes, Tools and Tutorials

[TOC]

Scope

This repo aims to consolidate experience gain from a recent CTF competition recording the different tool, tutorials and notes used during the lead up to and the competition.

Challenges were categorised as the following:

  • Investigation
    • Reverse engineering or code and ELF
    • Steganography
    • Cryptography
  • Penetration
    • Gain access to a server or webpage
  • Intelligence
    • Searching open source internet
  • Detection
    • Analysing network traffic for insider threat and external threat actors

The CTF categorised the difficulty of challenges as follows:

  • Novice
  • Advanced Beginner
  • Competent
  • Proficient
  • Expert

Tools

The primary OS used was Kali Linux. https://www.kali.org/ Kali has most of the tools required. Kali can run in VMWare. Running virtual machines is recommended as sometimes the puzzels contain executables where their origin is unknown.

When start a challenge as a beginner, it would be best to look at a reference like Mitre Att&ck - https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1187/ to assist with the start point.

General Tools

  1. Cyber Chef - https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
  2. Crack Station - https://crackstation.net/
  3. dCode - https://www.dcode.fr/en
  4. Hashes - https://hashes.com/en/decrypt/hash

Investigation Tools

Steganography

  1. https://stylesuxx.github.io/steganography/

Cryptography

  1. https://cryptii.com/

  2. https://towardsdatascience.com/breaking-the-enigma-code-in-python-with-mcmc-marvel-themed-9ceb358dd8ae

Password cracking

  1. https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=hashcat
  2. https://www.openwall.com/john/
  3. Rockyou.txt - https://github.com/brannondorsey/naive-hashcat/releases/download/data/rockyou.txt
  4. https://github.com/henriksb/ZipCrack

Reverse engineering

  1. Ghidra https://ghidra-sre.org/
  2. Visual studio Code
    1. Python Extensions
    2. SQL extensions
    3. C extensions

Network detection tools

  1. https://www.wireshark.org/

Penetration tools

  1. Visual Studio Code

    1. Visual Studio with SQL is needed to assist with correct formatting for SQL Injection attacks.

  2. NetCat

  3. SQL Injection - See the SQL Injection topic