The UCSB International Capture The Flag (also known as the iCTF) is a distributed, wide-area security exercise, whose goal is to test the security skills of the participants from both the attack and defense viewpoints.The Capture The Flag contest is a multi-site, multi-team hacking contest in which a number of teams compete independently against each other.Each team is given a virtualized server installation (for example, a virtual Linux server). The server provides a number of services. The services have a number of undisclosed vulnerabilities, which have been included in the server's software by the contest organizers.The goal of each team is to maintain the set of services available and uncompromised throughout the contest phase. Each team can (and should) attempt to compromise other teams' services. Since all the teams receive an identical copy of the virtual server, the task of each team is to find vulnerabilities in their copy of the server and possibly fix the vulnerabilities without disrupting the services. At the same time, the teams have to leverage their knowledge about the vulnerabilities they found to compromise the servers run by other teams. Compromising a service will allow a team to bypass the service security mechanisms and to "capture the flag" associated with a service.During the contest a scoring system keeps track, for each team, of which services are available, and which services have been compromised.The 2005 iCTF was scheduled Friday, December 9, 2005, from 8am to 4pm, PST (note: this was changed from the initial date of December 7th).The winner of the last edition of the competition (which was held in June 2005) was the team "The Tower of Hanoi", from Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

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