Year: 2001 Location: UC Santa Barbara Format: Red-Blue Team Exercise Participants: Internal UCSB graduate students only
The very first iCTF was not a public competition — it was an in-class exercise for a graduate security course at UC Santa Barbara. Two teams competed directly against each other on a small network of five bare-metal Linux machines housed at UCSB. One team (red) attacked while the other (blue) defended, and roles rotated.
Teams were named after sub-groups: the blue side had Alpha and Omega components, while the red side included sub-groups named Buzzco, Eagles, Escalation, E-Squared, Vulture, and Wolf. This exercise was the seed from which the international competition grew.
Five Intel x86 machines (166 MHz, 64–128 MB RAM) running Red Hat Linux 6.1/6.2 on the 128.111.54.0/24 network at UCSB:
| Hostname | IP | Name |
|---|---|---|
| BETA | 128.111.54.60 | altman |
| ALFA | 128.111.54.70 | coppola |
| GAMMA | 128.111.54.30 | truffault |
| KAPPA | 128.111.54.20 | leone |
| LAMBDA | 128.111.54.10 | mamet |
Primary service: SSH 1.2.27 (an intentionally vulnerable version).
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
2001_Winter/ |
Files from Winter 2001 exercise |
RedBlueTeam/ |
HTML reports, flag files, network info |
RedTeamBlueTeam 2001/ |
Exercise data (variant) |
Testbed/ |
Host configuration notes |
This exercise predates the public iCTF. It established the red-blue format and Giovanni Vigna / UCSB's tradition of running hacking competitions as educational tools. The next exercise (2002, "Treasure Hunt in Cyberspace") would be the first to have the structure more recognizable as a CTF.