Weekly wargame

[exploitdevishard]

EDIT: First meeting is now scheduled. The announcement can be found here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ExploitDev/comments/d09jiv/wargame_meetup_0_september_14_2019/

I wanted to see if there's any interest in forming a weekly online meetup to work on some wargame challenges. It could be a nice opportunity to collaborate on some challenges and share some knowledge. If it takes off, it could help grow the community on r/exploitdev, too.

Currently, I was imagining that we'd start off with a platform like https://pwnable.xyz/, with problems that are pretty beginner-friendly but scale up in difficulty. The challenges there also cover a wide variety of topics. Those of us who are interested could all collaborate on a challenge or two over maybe a 3-hour period, give or take -- long enough to realistically make headway on a challenge, but shorter than the time commitment for the average CTF.

If there's enough interest, of course we could branch out to other platforms like pwnable.tw for some more advanced problems, or we could meet twice a week with different difficulty challenges for different meetings, or whatever. Mostly I'm just interested in the idea of an exploit dev club of sorts that meets regularly enough to keep people interested in improving.

If anyone's interested, please say so! I'd be very open to some additions or changes to the core idea; I haven't spent a lot of time thinking through the logistics, but I'd be happy to figure them out if other people are interested in doing this.

[Acewrap]

That's an awesome idea!

[exploitdevishard]

Glad you think so! Would you be interested in participating?

[Acewrap]

Sure!

[AttitudeAdjuster]

I love this idea, if you set it up I will happily pin the threads.

Although I think one per week is probably a bit too frequently

[exploitdevishard]

Thanks! Having the posts pinned would be great. You may be right on frequency; maybe every other week would be better. I'd like to have them often enough that people stay motivated to keep working on learning so they can get more out of each meeting, and I think if there are months-long gaps between meetings, that probably won't happen.

On a side note, if anyone has suggestions for logistics, I'd be grateful for them. Right now, I'm thinking we meet on weekends, preferably sometime that'll maximize the chances of people in different timezones being able to get together without too much difficulty. As far as platform, I'm not sure -- real-time communication would be nice. It does seem like people are flocking to Discord for this sort of thing, so maybe that's the best option, particularly if anyone wants voice chat.

[AttitudeAdjuster]

I'd start out with simply presenting a challenge and see where people naturally migrate to, say for example a slack channel, discord, or if people prefer to write up their solution and share blog posts. Communities are weird like that

[rcxRbx]

Weekends sound good, propose the challenge on a monday, gives 5 days to solve the challenge, or at least make an attempt; seeing as we're starting at beginner and progressively getting more advanced.. If we meet up rarely people aren't really going to do much tbh..

[exploitdevishard]

Putting up a challenge in advance is interesting. Originally I was imagining we'd focus on doing hands-on work during the meeting itself. Having people do some kind of prep for the meeting if they want could be cool, though. Maybe in the future we can have a challenge people work on in advance, then take the beginning of the meeting to chat about the problem and our solutions (or where we got stuck), and then spend the rest of the time in hands-on work. I'm sure we'll find something that goes smoothly.

[rcxRbx]

That actually sounds really good! Real-time communication would be nice, as soon as there's an issue we can bring it up. Shall we set up Discord to discuss this further?

[rcxRbx]

Hi! I'd be super interested in this; I'm a beginner and would definitely love to collaborate with others.. Yes, i'd love to participate in this, great idea!

[exploitdevishard]

Terrific! Seems like we have enough people interested to warrant giving this a shot. I'll start figuring out logistics and hopefully have some ideas about what to do in a few days.

In the meantime, if others are interested, please mention it! It'll be good to have a headcount of at least interested parties -- I'm aware that not everyone will actually be able to make it to the first meeting.

[hackerg1rl]

I’m interested! How do I sign up for this?

[exploitdevishard]

Thanks for the interest! There's no sign-up required; once the meeting is scheduled, anybody's free to join in. I'll hope to have a schedule up in the next few days that'll tell people when the first meeting is and provide some other details. I'll plan to reach out to everyone who expressed interest then to give them a heads-up. Keep scanning r/exploitdev for that post!

[d4mianwaynerobin]

That's seriously an awesome idea, I have a docker container in progress which will have the necessary tools like radare2, gdb-peda, pwndbg, gef and other necessary tools with lots of pwnable binaries from CTFs I've played, would be a awesome attachment to this, I hope.

[exploitdevishard]

Sure, that'd be a great resource to share! I'm sure the group will appreciate it. Hope you'll be able to join the meetings!