Two years ago today the VulnHub website was born, and our gift to you this year comes in the form of a competition: ‘Sokar’.
Recap
But before we talk about the competition, here’s a recap since our last birthday:
- Ran a further two competitions (Hades & Persistence).
- Started a CTF Team.
- Indexed over 100+ vulnerable virtual machines!
Competitions
We may not of done as many competitions as we wanted to do in 2014, however, we are learning from each of them and how to improve on the next one. We feel that both competitions in the last year have been a great success, and we hope Sokar will be no exception. Remember, taking part in competitions are your only opportunities to bag a VulnHub t-shirt and a challenge coin!
CTF Team
The VulnHub CTF Team started from some of the regulars on IRC (superkojiman, barrebas, swappage and historypeats) who just couldn’t get enough challenges and puzzles. After doing a trial run (under the name of “buhnluv”), they have started regularly taking part in Capture The Flag events. In true VulnHub style, they are posting their solutions to capture the flag puzzles and exercises (when possible!).
100+ Vulnerable virtual machines
At the time of writing this post, there are 107 boot2root, vulnerable by design, virtual machines! All 122 GB of vulnerable machines are free for you to download and test your skills on.
For anyone who is wondering, our bandwidth usage is between 4TB – 7.5TB each month in 2014.
Additional news
Amongst other things, there have been various ‘back end’ improvements. The back end server has been moved and tweaked (expanded into a new hosting provider, switched to SSL/TLS etc) and managing our development has been vastly improved (issue tracking, feature requests etc). As a result, 2015 will be the year when you will start to see the front-end improvements that have been promised and asked for!
IRC activity has not been dull. It has been busy and stayed active over the last year. The member count has grown from 55/65 to 155/165 (that’s right folks, now with a ‘1’ in front!). For everyone who popped on just to say hello, ask a question or give feedback, cheers! More and more handles are turning into familiar names, becoming regulars and helping out others! Thank you for supporting VulnHub and it’s community, it means a great deal to us!
Competition
Now, without further ado… Announcing our Birthday competition, Sokar!
Lord Rasta Mouse, creator of the Kvasir series, and a long timer in the IRC channel, has very kindly crafted up a new Vulnerable Virtual Machine for us. On the Friday, 30th January 2015 16:30 UTC the challenge will is available for download! More details will follow when it goes live, however, what we can tell you now is that there will be more winners and more prizes than ever before.
Edit: Its live! Click here for the the challenge blog post.
Thanks & Future
VulnHub is a community project in which volunteers do in whatever free time they can. If you would like to lead a hand and donate some of your time, just get in touch, and we certainly put your skills and time to good use. Remember, if you want to jazz up your devices with some VulnHub stickers then all you have to do is let us know =).
Goals for this time next year:
- Improve the user experience on the site.
- Hold more competitions.
- Keep adding as many entries as possible!
Once again, a huge thank YOU to everyone who has supported the project and us!
…Here is to the ‘Terrible Twos’!
Warm regards,
The VulnHub Team