Marius Corici Co-founder and CEO for CTF365. The Hacker Conference partnered up with CTF365 to provide the best CTF experience during the conference. While trying to find out more about their product and also about their CTF surprise, I got an interview withCo-founder and CEO for CTF365.

Q: November 2012 was when you first announced about this project which was supposed to start at the begin-ning of 2013. What happened that made you delay the starting date?

A: Well, we're definitely enthusiastic about making CTF365 the greatest CTF platform out there, and this proves to be much more difficult than initially anticipated. I won't get into detail, because, as it happens, the story is like something pulled out from the theater of the absurd. If we would ever get a chance to make a making-of- CTF365 movie, I'm sure it would be amusing and tragic at the same time.





What I will say [and repeat], is that we are putting our best efforts into making CTF365 work, we are a small and committed team, which is a problem [for us] but not an excuse [for everyone else], and… yeah, we're definitely trying to get this done and work.





Q: How did security enthusiasts receive the CTF365 project?

A: The response so far has been more than great. We haven't started yet, and already we have over 5000 registered users and about 300 teams ready to play the game. This is great and scary at the same time, because it's putting pressure on us to get this ready asap, and also to make this work as great as possible.





Q: What's next? When it'll be ready to launch?

A: We're not keen on giving exact dates, because of our first attempt at setting an exact date. We're preparing a first CTF campaign; I won't go into details yet about that. We're aiming with this campaign to also see how the platform works in a production setup; as we've already said, one of goals is to also emulate real-life internet scenarios, where anything goes. We also know that most of our current users prefer offensive roles instead of defensive, so we took that into consideration as well for our first campaign. We're also keen to see what happens.





Q: What makes your CTF special and different than what exist at this time on the internet?

A: Well, that's an easy one really:

The real life internet. Beside different campaigns for fun, we'll have networks the users will be able to play/attack hundreds and thousands of VMs. Also that means to let security enthusiasts to train as would be in real scenarios DoS and DDoS included. Pushing CTF to last 365 days. Make it easy for everybody to setup their own CTF using our platform. This will help InfoSec vendors and security training companies to better train their students, market and testing their products through gamification.

Q: What do you mean by "...setup their own CTF"?

A: We will offer this service to all companies that want to setup a CTF competition. Imagine that you are a infosec training company. Offering a CTF to your students will increase learning retention rate not to mention the entertaining side of the game.





Q: What do you have in mind for The Hacker Conference CTF competition?

A: Keeping in mind that the event (THC) will take place in India, we'll build a custom storyline tailored for the Asia-Pacific region.





Q: Any particular message for our readers?