Can we count on you to unlock the city?

Hacky Holidays – Unlock the City has come to an end and the results are in! We are overwhelmed with the great effort of every crew and individual in the battle against the rogue A.I. algorithm.

So a big thanks to everyone who joined Unlock the City and made sure that the Smart City returned to its peaceful nature.

Unlock the City consisted of three phases in which in every phase a new part of the city revealed additional challenges to be solved. During phase one, players had the opportunity to solve challenges in the districts of Science Park and Hacky Harbour. In the second phase, challenges of Commercial Avenue were unlocked. In the final phase, phase 3, the challenges in Downtown were unlocked at last, meaning that all challenges were made available to be solved. The participants got to test and train their skills on a range of different technologies such as cloud hacking, quantum computing, IoT, Industrial Control Systems, reverse engineering and abusing weak cryptography. When a challenge was successfully solved, the participants were awarded with a flag, which was worth points on the leader board.

There were two leagues in Unlock the City, one for students and one for professionals, where the top 3 teams in each league could win a prize. Finally, participants could win a prize for making a creative write-up or video walkthrough of their favourite challenge. Read on for facts about the event or click click here to jump straight to the winners. Do not forget to watch the after-movie

Hacky Holidays – Unlock the City was a great success with 33 different challenges, 1242 active participants, more than 10.000 flags captured, estimated more than 10.000 hours played and participants from 128 different countries. The team bootplug was the only team able to solve all the challenges in the event and thereby fully unlocking the city. A lot of participants contacted the Hackazon Team to ask questions about the challenges and it was great to be part of their learning experience. Of course, no game-changing hints were given that would influence the results of the top leader board. We have received a lot of feedback from participants that they learnt a lot of new things; played their first Capture the Flag and had a lot of fun solving the challenges. There was great creativeness in solving the CTF challenges: more than once, people found ways to solve our challenges in ways we didn’t expect. It was great to read your write-ups and the team learnt some new tricks from you too.

The Deloitte team behind Unlock the City had a lot of fun creating and supporting the event. Over the three weeks in which Hacky Holidays took place, we answered your (100+) questions via e-mail, and even got to know some of you and your backgrounds a bit more. From a challenge infrastructure point of view, it ran mostly smoothly. A lot of challenges required a unique system (docker container or a VM) to be launched for an individual user. To handle the load, multiple systems (pods) were available to run the challenges. This turned out to be more than sufficient for the event – even with fully virtualised Windows and Macintosh systems running in parallel.

The Hacky Holidays team wants to thank everyone for being part of this event. A shout out to Narwal Creative for creating the epic Unlock the City theme with awesome story writing, graphic and sound design. Next, we want to thank everyone involved in creating challenges, which were provided by Deloitters from all over the world, in specific our colleagues from Belgium, Finland, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain and Australia. Thanks to the Hackazon platform team, which offered the solid infrastructure. Also, a shout out to all the marketing people who made sure that no one missed out on our third Hacky Holidays experience.

See you at the next one!

What is in it for me

First of all, you will learn a lot about the various cyber security topics introduced in the game, but that is not all! You can also win a prize for creating a writeup or solving the most challenges. The winners will be announced on August 2rd on the Hacky Holidays website.

Top 3 student teams

• 🏆 1st place: 1337 USD
• 🏆 2nd place: 777 USD
• 🏆 3rd place 337 USD

* Each member of a student team must sign up as a student and be able to provide evidence of being a student.

Top 3 non-student teams
🏆 The members of the top 3 non-student teams are awarded a 50 USD voucher which you can spend at the M5STACK webshop for your IoT hobby projects!

Best 10 writeups
🏆 We invite everyone who solved a challenge to write a creative and detailed writeup on how you solved the challenge. You must publish the writeup after the game has ended in order not to spoil the solution to anyone else in the competition (starting July 27th). Out of those writeups we will select the best 10 write-ups that will be rewarded with a 50 USD voucher which you can spend at the M5STACK webshop for your IoT hobby projects! You can participate by submitting (a link to) your writeup to hackazon@deloitte.nl until August 1st, 2022.

Best 3 video-writeups
🏆 We invite everyone who solved a challenge to (screen-)record a creative and detailed video-writeup on how you solved the challenge. You must publish the writeup after the game has ended in order not to spoil the solution to anyone else in the competition (starting July 27th). The write-up must be published on a publicly available platform. Out of those writeups we will select the best 3 write-ups that will be rewarded with a 50 USD voucher which you can spend at the M5STACK webshop for your IoT hobby projects! If you submit your video you also make a chance that your video write-up will be used in the aftermovie! You can participate by submitting (a link to) your video-writeup to hackazon@deloitte.nl until August 1st, 2022.

Note: Deloitte employees can play in the event but are excluded from winning a prize. The top X players refers to the entries on the scoreboard and is based on the total score of the team and the time of flag submissions. Participants can win a maximum of 2 vouchers by participating in Hacky Holidays.