alt Hacker NewsSince this is the top comment at the moment: CTF stands for Capture The Flag.
Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug
Replies
bawolff • yesterday at 11:39 PM
Just to give the actual answer, CTF in this context means a computer security competition. Generally the way they work, is you get some programs, and you have to hack them to get some string called the flag (e.g. maybe the server has a root owned file called flag, so you have to get root somehow to read the file). Team with the most flags at the end wins.
In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the initialism, i think to help distinguish from other uses of the term.
CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like
> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.
Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym