I made a little CTF for a Dutch inspirational weekend school. It turned out to be a bit too difficult for the kids, but with my help they were able to get pretty far regardless.

If you want to try it, I’m planning to keep it online for a little while at hackweekend.fun. It’s in Dutch. There are 7 levels. So far two hackers have finished it, while two others have gotten stuck at level 6.

Tips: Don’t try too hard, think simple first. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. You can do the whole challenge without any special tools except a web browser that can do view page source. Read well.

Maybe after a while I’ll make a docker image and take the website offline, so you can host it yourself if you want to try it.

Anyway I learned a lot about making a hacking challenge for an audience that’s not technical. Next time I’ll definitely make sure there’s more of a slow build up of knowledge, so people don’t get stuck at level 2 for instance. It’s fun to see kids get enthausiastic about finishing a level. But don’t think this challenge is easy, as I said some experienced hackers got stuck at level 6.

I also learned a lot about frontends (I had never even used bootstrap before), and had fun building the backend in Go.

Screenshot of level 1:

Screenshot of hackweekend.fun

Have fun!