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by graceful68006 hours ago |
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upvoteby worble6 hours ago|
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CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like

> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.

Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym

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upvoteby itsboring42 seconds ago|
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Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 for me.
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upvoteby trescenzi3 hours ago|
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It's also a game people play in person as well. It's the same as the Halo version except you tag each other instead of shooting. It's really fun to play in big open areas with large teams.
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upvoteby acters3 hours ago|
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Yeah, but we have AI now, we don't need our blog posts to over explain or state what it all means to general audiences. The author name-drops a bunch of CTF events hosted by a variety of independent organizations and name-drops well-known teams.

To help everyone, this Capture The Flag is specifically Cybersecurity adjacent, there is a Wikipedia article on it as the top Google search result for me when searching "CTF". This is why the acronym is used, because searching for the full will get you to the wrong "sport" vs the cybersecurity one.

I don't want to explain what a CTF is. look at the Wikipedia article. It is there for a good reason.

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upvoteby bawolff5 hours ago|
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Just to give the actual answer, CTF in this context means a computer security competition. Generally the way they work, is you get some programs, and you have to hack them to get some string called the flag (e.g. maybe the server has a root owned file called flag, so you have to get root somehow to read the file). Team with the most flags at the end wins.

In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the initialism, i think to help distinguish from other uses of the term.

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