Writeups and Walkthroughs

Writeups are a magical part of Capture the Flag culture. Once the competition ends, a bunch of people will write up how they solved challenges and then post them on the internet for everyone else.

This means that people who didn't solve the challenge can follow along and get most of the benefits of working through it, while leaning on the hardwork that some kind CTFer has put in for them.

The secret to being good at CTF is staying on top of writeups and constantly working through ones that other people have released in your area of specialization. Back in college I tried to do every single Network Forensics writeup that was released and kept them very well organized... I wound up being very good at Netforensics challenges after that.

As a note, I did not write most of the writeups in this course, I went and found high quality documents scattered around the internet and organized them into a good structure. Those internet heroes who wrote the writeups (as well as the volunteers who wrote the challenges) are the reason this course is possible, because I still haven't found the time to make unique challenges for all of these topics.