Big ass update before the end of the year! A lot of stuff from the community requests has been implemented over the weekend. It was basically non stop work, order some food, sleep a few hours and more work. But damn if this isn’t glorious.
Contract Categories
So we know people like having some sort of additional categorization, besides just the difficulty levels. Since most Hacktoria CTF’s span several disciplines, we’ve opted to not put them in single categories. You can now see “ingredient lists” for each Contract on the Contracts overview pages, which are still segmented by difficulty level.
How to play Section
Both the Contracts and Monthly CTF pages now have a short description, giving some more clarity to people new to Hacktoria.
Improved Universe Page
The Hacktoria Universe page received more information. In addition to the wallpapers and artwork, you can also read about your team members in the Aquila Cell and the Tiberian Order as a whole.
New Overseer
Meet Cassandra Blackwell, your new Overseer. Klumgongyn is back as the alien liaison inside the Aquila Cell, as a direct team member. Cassandra is also available as the main Discord bot to interact with.
Improved James Bond
The MI6 agent bot was cloned, made private for Hacktoria and had his backstory re-written. He’s now acutely aware of Aquila Cell, the Tiberian Order, and even has some interesting history with Julia Sharpe.
Your Team is now in Discord
We’ve made custom Discord bot characters, with backstories and personalities, for each of the Aquila Cell members. These characters are fully aware of their team mates names and roles. As well as the background of the Tiberian Order, and their existence in the Aquila Cell. There is even some fun history between James Bond, who still works for MI6, and our very own Julia Sharpe. Who started her career at that very agency.
To keep the Discord server a bit sane, we’ve toned down the NSFW responses and made the bots a little less responsive. We can of course dial that up if we want to have some fun!
Use the /characters command to see the full list of available characters.
Write-ups Page Improved
The write-ups page has been improved. Featuring a dynamic table with search and sort functions. You can now find write-ups by contract or author. In addition to this, you can now earn 10K Hacktoria Coins for each write-up you submit in Discord.
Buy Hints for Monthly CTF
Not with real money, but Hacktoria Coins in Discord. There will be a hint available for each monthly event. Use your gambling and write-up earnings to get a little ahead in the competition.
Collectibles Removed
As the coins in Discord now have a different function, we’re removing the collectible cards. Those who purchased them now have something very unique.
Wallpapers Galore!
We’ve made wallpapers for all the Contracts and Operations, these are now available via the Universe page. Links go to shared Google Drive, saving some space on the web-server, since they’re all in 4K.
Monthly CTF Page Updated
Updated the page to list all the current and previous events, also gave this some nicer artwork. The 7 fingered communist was a bit lame.
CTF Team Page Improvements
The CTF Team page has a cooler image. And now also has a dynamic table with the events you played. You can sort and search by event, team and scores.
Blog Section Improved
The blogposts all have their own cover art now. Navigation is also made similar to the rest of the site. And there is now an author box under every blogpost, so you know who wrote the post.
Easier Navigation
The main menu now features emoji’s in addition to the text. This should help with quicker identification of the place you want to go.
Services Page Added
The Hacktoria team is for hire to create CTF events and other OSINT related educational material. The services page with our leadform is back online.
Contract Fixed: Epicentre
Thanks to Fabien, the flagfile for Epicentre is now fixed. The password was broken and unclear for most people.
đ¤ So, now WHAT?
Happy Holidays everyone! This update took my whole weekend to pull off, so I’m kinda done for now. Writing this at 03:30 in the morning. The team is done doing QA on all the old Community Contracts, so we’ll be adding those back with new artwork next year.
First we have to focus on the finishing touches for Operation Phoenix…
See you next year!
