On October 3, Russia hosted the RuCTF Finals, in which students and information security specialists from different countries competed online this year. RuCTF is an annual open intercollegiate competition and conference on information security, which took place for the fourteenth time in 2021. Its goal is to foster and train information security specialists in situations that are as close as possible to real work.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ partnered with the event to support new cybersecurity professionals.
The 25 best teams that took part in the RuCTFE 2019 international challenge and the top 25 teams from RuCTFE 2020 competed in this year's event. The total number of participants reached 400, which is almost double the participation in previous RuCTF finals.
This year's RuCTF finals took place entirely in the cloud infrastructure. The competition, as usual, was driven by the classic Attack-Defense CTF rules. Each team was to protect and ensure the operation of a set of their services as well as to find and exploit vulnerabilities in the other teams’ services. The competition was broadcast on YouTube. A conference on information security was held at the same time. Leading specialists from major Russian IT companies spoke about the services that the team members were protecting at the time, as well as gave career guidance lectures and discussed IT-related jobs.
After the eight hour challenge, the Bushwhackers team from Moscow State University, Russia, won the competition. Second place was also taken by a Russian team, C4T BuT S4D from the Higher School of Economics, and third place went to Germany – the Enoflag team representing Berlin Technical University.
