Miscellaneous

Many challenges in CTFs will be completely random and unprecedented, requiring simply logic, knowledge, and patience to be solved. There is no sure-fire way to prepare for these, but as you complete more CTFs you will be able to recognize and hopefully have more clues on how to solve them.

Examples

In recent CTFs the sheer variety of miscellaneous tasks has been highly exemplified, for example:

• In the Sochi Olympic CTF 2014, there was a low-point miscellaneous challenge which only provided a jumbled string of words. Instead of being a typical crypto challenge, the answer required competitors to draw out the word SOCHI on their keyboards.
• RuCTF had a challenge which presented a single picture of shredded strips of paper jumpled up in a random order. The best way of solving this was by hand! No computer knowledge was even needed for its completion, only patience and a good eye.

Sources/See More

CTF Write-Ups

CTFTime