Alex Dean Cybulski is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Presently, he is writing a dissertation on capture the flag competitions, play and games in hacker culture and the information security industry.
In this session he will talk about the field he is studying – specifically Capture the flag (CTF). It is a competitive game in which players mimic the experience of discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in information systems, hacking into simulated software and/or networks to retrieve data known as a ‘flag.’ CTF participants, often drawn from the information security and IT industries utilize these games as a means of training to develop/apply offensive security knowledge in a legal way, so that they can better defend the software/systems they are entrusted with.
This presentation will discuss preliminary findings of his research: ethnographic, semi-structured interviews with a team of players at an on-site CTF who also share the same workplace.