OSINT Missing Persons CTF

Hosted by Micah Hoffman in partnership with Trace Labs

Friday, December 13th, 6:30pm - 9:30pm

Saturday, December 14th, 6:30pm - 9:30pm

Attendance at this special experience is limited to students attending a course at the event.

In partnership with Trace Labs who provides crowd-sourced, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) capture the flag events for actual missing persons, SANS is offering a non-theoretical contest known as Missing Persons CTF.

The Missing Persons CTF is a Capture the Flag event where contestants work in teams to crowdsource the collection of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to assist local law enforcement in locating missing persons. In the information security community, a typical CTF will be of a technical nature where flags are hidden within pre-configured servers/virtual machines that contestants have to obtain using hacking techniques to gain points. The Missing Persons CTF differs from this by having different flag categories based off pieces of information that law enforcement would look to gather to aid in a missing persons case. Contestants compete in teams to discover new pieces of intelligence about people that have been reported missing to local law enforcement and then submit those data points to the CTF scoring system where a panel of judges will assign points to the team based on the type of data reported. No prior experience in OSINT or CTFs is required! If you can Google, you can succeed in this event!

This event provides an opportunity for us to do #OSINTForGood knowing that we are doing work that might impact real lives and actual missing persons. The intel gathered from the CTF participants is provided directly to law enforcement as quickly as possible so they can continue to work the cases and hopefully bring them to resolution.

This inaugural event is limited to the first 75 people who register. There will be a table by the book distribution near the Coats Room (Terrace Level) on December 12th. We will be taking registrations there starting at 8am.