Posts tagged "sans holiday hack challenge"

Reversing Frostbit - SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2024

Frostbit Decrypt was one of the challenges in Act III of the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2024: Snow-maggedon and involved defeating ransomware which had encrypted Santa’s Naughty-Nice list. Whilst reverse engineering of the Go x86-64 ELF binary was not strictly required, I took the opportunity to improve my reverse engineering skills and focus on reverse engineering in detail instead of completing the challenge proper. This post focuses on my learnings from this adventure and sets out to prove whether or not it is possible to decrypt the ransomed data based solely on the binary and its provided core dump.

SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2023

Between December 7, 2023 and January 6, 2024, the SANS Institute hosted the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge & KringleCon 2023, open to anyone to participate for free. This was the second year I participated.

SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2022

Between December 6, 2022 and January 6, 2023, the SANS Institute hosted the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge & KringleCon 2022, open to anyone to participate for free. Similar to previous years, the challenges were structured around a holiday themed story where Santa’s five rings of power had been stolen by Grinchum, whilst the KringleCon virtual conference talks were viewable online.