Catch the flag
Five years off the board. 2027 we come back.
In 2022 we ran a 24 hour capture the flag that pulled 400+ hackers from 25+ countries. The next one is harder. The list below decides whether it runs.
Next board2027
one challenge, one scroll away
Prove it / 30 seconds
You do not need an account to start.
Here is a live one, the same shape as the warm-up tier from 2022. No signup, no download, nothing to install. Everything you need is in the box.
Solve it and the seat form remembers you did.
Flag accepted. That is the entire loop: find the string, submit the string, take the points. Thirty of those, twenty four hours, one scoreboard.
Claim your seatThe format / 2022
A board of locked doors. You pick which one.
2022 was jeopardy. No opponent to attack, no network to defend. Categories across, challenges down, each one a self contained artifact with a string hidden inside it.
Teams of one to four. Free. Twenty four hours on the clock, and dynamic scoring so a challenge is worth exactly as much as it is rare. These were the nine categories on that board.
2027 / not locked yet
2022 stopped at low medium on purpose so nobody bounced. The warm-up tier stays. What sits above it, and what shape the whole thing takes, is still being argued about.
Receipts / NECTF 2022
We have run this before.
What players wrote afterwards
An easy CTF that was well run.
Pretty good CTF, and the challenges had enough information to solve them.
Challenge creators were not online during the CTF in Discord, which meant a whole sort of mess and contradiction.
Backed in 2022 by
- GitHub
- DigitalOcean
- CTFtime
- CTFd
- Major League Cyber
The prize / what you play for
Certificates, cloud credit, and one thing you cannot download.
This is what the 2022 board paid out. Online teams took the credit and the swag. The trophy stayed in the room.
- The crownGlory, and a nod to contributing to the safety and security of the nation.
- The mazeYour problem solving, standing on a foundation of the basics.
The onsite trophy. Handed to the winning team in the room in Roorkee, designed rather than ordered, with Keep Calm & Catch The Flag engraved on the base.
Remote teams competed on the same board for the same scoreboard. The trophy is the one thing that needed you to be there.
Sponsors / the ceiling
Every seat above 500 is somebody else's budget.
We are not a company. The board, the challenge targets and the domain come out of our own pockets, so capacity is the honest constraint on how many people get to play.
In 2022 sponsors did not just put a logo on a slide. DigitalOcean credit reached every participant. GitHub sent shirts. That is developer reach with a receipt.
2027 / what changes
2022 was the on-ramp. 2027 is the building.
Harder, and wider. Not one artifact with one trick. We are looking at multi stage chains, and at categories that did not exist for us in 2022: machine learning, AI and agent security among them.
Authors on Discord for the full clock. We got that wrong last time in public, so it is a hard requirement now.
No corrections in the final hour. Ever again.
The warm-up tier stays. First timers still get on the scoreboard in a minute. The ceiling is what moves.
Format is open. Jeopardy, hybrid, online and onsite together, none of it is signed off yet.
Why this page exists
The last one disappeared.
NECTF 2022 was marketed on CTF platforms, ran for 24 hours, and then evaporated. The domain lapsed. The sockets went dark. The Discord invite in our own event deck is dead. What survived is a handful of write-ups other people happened to publish.
So to run it again we would be starting from nothing, which is a stupid way to lose five years of goodwill.
This page is the fix. A permanent record of what the event actually was, kept in one place that does not expire, so the next one starts from something instead of from zero.
- ArchiveEvery challenge from 2022, the technique that broke it, and which targets are somehow still online.
- CommunityA place to find the next one without depending on a platform listing that scrolls away.
- ContributingIf you want to author a challenge for 2027, the door is open. It is not the ask right now.
Discord is being rebuilt. The 2022 invite expired along with everything else.
Seats / free, always
Claim a seat for 2027.
One email when the date locks. Nothing else, ever, and no cost at any point.
500 is a capacity number, not a hype number. We self fund the servers, so that is what we can host well. Sponsors are what move it.
Do I need experience?
No. The warm-up tier exists so a first timer is on the scoreboard inside a minute. In 2022 the very first challenge was solved by viewing source.
Do I need a team?
No. Teams are one to four people, and one is a valid number. In 2022 you created a team with a name and a password, then shared an invite link.
What does it cost?
Nothing. It was free in 2022 and it is free in 2027.
Why only 500 seats?
Because we pay for the infrastructure ourselves. In 2022 that meant 200 online teams and 30 onsite, for exactly the same reason. 500 is what we can host without the board falling over. Every sponsor who comes on board raises that number, which is why the sponsor page exists.
What if it does not happen?
Then you get one email saying so. We would rather tell you that than run something underbaked.