UBC hackers capture the ultimate flag in Vegas for three years running
The University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Capture the Flag (CTF) cybersecurity team, Maple Bacon, has done it yet again at DEF CON.
The team joined forces with the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) team as well as CMU alumni and hackers from the CMU Alum start-up Theori.io (The Duck), playing under the name Maple Mallard Magistrates (MMM). Together, the team won the 2024 DEF CON Capture the Flag title for the third year in a row.
DEF CON hosts the world’s largest and renowned computer security competition, and this year it was held in Las Vegas from August 8-11.
Widely considered the ‘Olympics’ of hacking, DEF CON drew cybersecurity professionals, researchers and students, as 12 of the world’s top teams (who qualified from a field of 1,742 teams) attempted to break each other’s systems, steal virtual flags and earn points, while simultaneously protecting their own.
Teamwork, from start to finish
Founder and leader of the UBC Maple Bacon team, Dr. Robert Xiao, said it wasn’t a sure win right from the outset, “It was tough! By the end of the second day, we were second, and it wasn't clear if we would make first place. We worked hard all through Saturday night and we were able to crack almost all of the challenges using reverse engineering, finding vulnerabilities and developing patches & exploits. On Sunday our score shot up and the hard work paid off handsomely with the win. However, team Blue Water gave us a real challenge and demonstrated how strong the competition was this year.”
Xiao’s role at DEF CON 2024 was to support the team and UBC students. He helped develop and maintain some of the internal infrastructure they used in the competition and even participated in one of the 1v1 LiveCTF rounds.
In terms of a training ground, winning competitions like DEF CON is putting UBC Computer Science on the map for excellence in cybersecurity. Dr. Xiao said, “With this win, UBC's Maple Bacon team has solidly established itself as the top cybersecurity competition team in Canada, and cemented UBC's reputation as a world-class university for learning cybersecurity skills through its Computer Science program and CTF team. They have done extraordinarily well, and team members have repeatedly received recognition both within the team and from others.”
One win is everybody’s win
Not only an exceptional leader (and founder of the team), Dr. Xiao is passionate about giving the team the best possible chance. He donated over $12K from his win last year at CODE GATE CTF in South Korea to help fund the Maple Bacon members in getting to DEF CON.
As the number of cybersecurity attacks continues to increase worldwide, competitions like DEF CON provide the opportunity for leading cybersecurity engineers to measure up against one another, learning and developing new techniques as they work through various challenges.
Maple Bacon is always eager to accept and welcome new members (UBC students, faculty and alumni), and no previous coding or competition experience is necessary.
More about the Maple Bacon team
About The UBC Computer Science department:
The department is rated in the top 25 of its kind in the world, and is currently tied for first place in Canada.
UBC Computer Science brings innovative leadership and expertise to advance the discipline of computer science and collaboratively solve real-world problems in other disciplines.
We sit at the forefront of the artificial intelligence and machine learning revolution, the explosion of data science, the acceleration of human-computer interaction, the ever-growing demand for cyber-security, and the constant expansion of computer graphics and computer systems research.