Blogs

HEX ADVENT 2025: Crack the Advent, Conquer the Threat 🐛 WELCOME TO HEX ADVENT 2025, ‘tis the season to Unwrap Your Potential! 🎁 HEX ADVENT 2025 is a Christmas-themed CTF Advent Calendar, designed for women, by women. What to Expect 12 Days, 12 Challenges: A structured schedule to build mastery across different CTF categories. Focus Areas: Pwn (Binary Exploitation) Cryptography Reverse Engineering Forensics OSINT Web Exploitation Our Mission: To empower women in cybersecurity, create visible role models, and cultivate a robust local talent pool....

Information This is a solo CTF event open to women residing in Singapore or Malaysia. To register and be eligible for the prizes: Register on CTFd, and select the “eligible” bracket. Confirm your eligibility by filling in the Google Form. The flag format is described by this regex: /^HEX{.*}$/ There are a total of 12 challenges. One challenge will be released each day at 09:00 SGT within the period of 1 December 2025 to 12 December 2025....

The Target: Brother MFC-J1010DW Affected Models: Brother Printer MFC-J1010DW Vulnerable Firmware: Version <= 1.18 TL;DR: The Vulnerability Chain We discovered three vulnerabilities that when chained together, allow for complete remote compromise: Authentication Bypass via SNMP - Retrieve the printer’s serial number without authentication, allowing attackers to derive the default admin password Unauthenticated Firmware Rollback - Downgrade to vulnerable firmware versions over the network, no credentials required Buffer Overflow via Referer Header - Execute arbitrary code by crafting malicious HTTP headers The result?...

TL;DR 🚀 We’re turning a simple compression library into a shell delivery service! This writeup exploits a buffer overflow in lz1/lz77 decompression by crafting malicious compressed data that overflows the stack and chains ROP gadgets for code execution. Ever wondered how a simple file compression tool could hand you the keys to a system? Well, buckle up because we’re about to turn andyherbert’s innocent lz1 compressor into our personal shell delivery service!...

Last month, Jacob asked me to create a CTF challenge for the Summer Pwnables event. I went with a kernel pwnable since my goal was to teach students some more advanced Linux kernel exploitation techniques - something that wouldn’t get solved in a day (and hopefully not by AI either). After building both the challenge and solution, I figured students should be able to crack it within 3-7 days. Turns out I was right about the timeline, but only one person actually solved it....

During our security research in 2024, we discovered several vulnerabilities in Apache Foundation projects that seem to have gotten ’lost in translation’ between our bug reports and the CVE assignment process. While we’ve been patiently waiting for these findings to officially ‘count,’ they’ve apparently been stuck longer than a software update on a Friday afternoon. Almost a year went by without any CVEs assigned and which we completely forgot about until now....

[Updates] Summer Pwnables 2025 Major Announcement: ISD Sponsorship We are pleased to announce that Internal Security Department (ISD) is sponsoring Summer Pwnables Challenge #0002 Challenge #003. Distribution Rule Challenge #002 and #003 are meant for Singaporean students. Each Singaporean student can only win once across all challenges to ensure broader community recognition. However, they can still submit their solutions in order to win the new “Grand Prize” Prizes are still $100 SGD + the “From Day Zero to Zero Day” book written by Eugene “Spaceraccoon” Lim for the first five solvers....