Guiding Principles
Cyber Fire events feel different than most Capture The Flag exercises, because we focus on education.
- Mistakes are important
- We’ve found people learn best when they try things outside their comfort zone, so we do everything we can to create an environment where participants feel safe to make mistakes. Everyone is expected to treat their own mistakes, and those of other participants, as both positive and inevitable.
- There are no prizes
- We want the focus to be on learning, not on how to win the prize. We don’t allow any sort of prizes at our events.
- Events should feel fair
- The team who does the most successful work should place on top. This steers a whole lot of other decisions we make. For instance, we don’t give bonuses for being quick, and we don’t give penalties for wrong answers. We also don’t run categories where starting late makes it impossible to catch up, like getting a point for every minute your team holds a “flag”. What we are trying to award points for is whether your team has worked out a solution, and nothing more.
- We expect creative mayhem
- As a security analyst, you have to think like a “bad guy” in order to better understand what attacks might come next. We want you to be creative in your approach to solving puzzles, but we do have a few ground rules, mostly related to everybody having a good experience, and limiting the expense of running events.
Respect Our Policies
In order to achieve our education goals, we have set up a few rules. We reserve the right to kick anyone out of our event for any reason, but there are a few things that might be okay in other places which aren’t okay at Cyber Fire events.
- Harassment is not allowed
- Cyber Fire does not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. Our full anti-harassment policy can be consulted if you need it.
- Network-level attacks are not allowed
- SYN flooding, ARP cache poisoning, WiFi deauthentication, and other network-level attacks are not allowed. These are important techniques to understand and play with, but Cyber Fire events are not set up for this.
- Attacking other participants’ computers is not allowed
- We have put a lot of effort into making the puzzles fun to attack. Go after those instead.
Dress Code
Cyber Fire’s official dress code is “Geek Casual”. “Casual” means different things in different place. For example, shorts are fine in Southern California, but will be out of place at events closer to Washington, DC.
If an event has a special dress code, we will mention this on the event’s page.
