ISTS CTF Info

Welcome to the CTF portion of the 2026 ISTS competition! Here, you'll find information about the CTF and how it will be run. If you have any further questions, check out the #blue-ctf-questions channel on the Discord server. You can ping the @CTF role.

Rules

Discord Rules:

  1. Treat everyone with respect. Absolutely no harassment, witch hunting, sexism, racism, or hate speech of any kind will be tolerated.
  2. No spam or self-promotion. Unless you have express permission from a member of the ISTS CTF team, you may not promote servers or post advertisements.
  3. No NSFW or obscene content. This includes text, images, or links featuring nudity, sex, hard violence, or other graphically disturbing content.

ISTS CTF Rules:

  1. Do not attack the infrastructure. The ISTS CTF infrastructure is not part of the challenges. The use of penetration tools such as Nmap and DirBuster on the CTF infrastructure is strictly prohibited.
  2. Do not give out flags or hints. To keep this CTF as fair as possible, do not share any hints or answers with anyone outside of your team. You may discuss specific challenges in public channels only as long as you do not give away crucial information.
  3. Do not ask anyone for flags or hints. This includes event participants/organizers as well as Q&A websites such as StackOverflow and Quora. You are, however, encouraged to ask any questions you may have in the #blue-ctf-questions channel.
  4. No flag-hoarding. When you get a flag, submit it right away. It is important that you do not hoard flags to ensure that teams know exactly where they stand every step of the way.

General Rules:

  1. If you see anything that breaks one or more of these rules (including public messages, DMs, etc.), reach out to an admin (@CTF on Discord) and let them know as soon as possible.
  2. Failure to follow these rules may result in message deletion, temporary or permanent bans, score freezes, point deductions, etc.
  3. These rules are interpreted at the discretion of the ISTS CTF team. As such, all decisions are final and unappealable.

CTF Access

Your CTFd team accounts have already been created for you. Each team has a unique user on the infrastructure: "teamXX" where"XX" is your two-digit team number. The password for your team is provided in your blue team packet. Once you have logged in to your team account, you may begin submitting flags immediately.

Scoring

The CTF portion of the ISTS competition makes up 20% of your total score. Challenges are scored dynamically, meaning challenges with fewer solves are worth more points according to the following table:

Solves 0-1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15+
Points 500 498 491 479 463 443 417 388 353 314 270 222 169 112 50