A Melbourne penetrator tester has run a capture the flag event giving away Bitcoins to those who beat web application challenges.

The contest was the brainchild of Securus Global consultant Luke Jahnke who was exploring Server Side Includes (SSI) injection.

The May contest received 6652 unique IP address hits with about 50 from Tor relays.

Users raced to grab a single Bitcoin key contained in an environmental variable in the Apache httpd process after completing four challenges.

A further Bitcoin key went out to the single user who attained command execution on the server.

The first three levels presented users with manual SQL injection exploitation challenges. Of the 4123 users who attempted the first level, only 101 passed to the next stage and 53 to the third, Jahnke said at Ruxmon on Friday.

Twenty three users made the final SSI injection challenge and only one owned the server to make off with the last Bitcoin.

SSI risks were commonly overlooked, Jahnke said.

He will launch another Bitcoin challenge in August with larger prizes, he said.