A special thanks to all of our sponsors who have contributed over the years.
Pros V Joes would not be what it is today without your support.

Latest Finished Event

BSidesLV 2021

Scorebot

The Pros V Joes's Scorebot software is the heart of the ProsVJoes CTF and has recently undergone a complete rewrite. Designed from the ground up for the unique offense/defense style of play, it has grown along with the game and has become even better than ever with all of the new changes.

It's capabilities include (obviously) scoring the game, monitoring scored services for uptime, tracking flags and submissions, receiving beacons from assets compromised by Red Cell, and interacing with a ticketing system that the Blue Teams receive tasks from. As of BSidesLV 2017, the game now also features the economics portion, where Blue TEams can spend their points on advntages and assets that will help them win the game! Even Red Cell can get into the action!

An open source project, we welcome pull requests with contributions.

Other surprises...

The planning for PVJCTF at BSLV2019 is in the final stages. We're focusing on building something new and cool while stabilizing our environment and increasing capacity while fine tuning the additions we made this year.

...but more on that later. ;)

The Staff

Pros V Joes is the result of literally thousands of hours by over a few dozen individuals to build a realistic environment for players to attack and defend.

This is the admin team, the guys and gals that design, implement, and run the games. We've grown considerably over the years, and have just picked up a few new folks who will be listed here soon...

• Dichotomy - founded the CTF and runs the show, but is fortunate and lucky to have such a fantastic team of hackers and geeks on staff, without whom none of this would be possible.
• captain-opsec - The Chief of Staff, second only to Dichotomy. One of the key members of the Gold Team Executive Council. He makes sure things get done and keeps it all on the rails.
• Veloce Vettura - Senior Advisor and Very Senior Curmugeon. This gentleman has been in the cyber security business for several decades and he brings considerable wisdom, experience, and insight to the team. A long time friend of dichotomy and an invaluable member of the Gold Team Executive Council, he helps keep the ship from heading into the rocks.
• Gabe- Our Senior Game Architect. He is a senior information security data scientist who specializes in data science, machine learning, and graph theory applications to cyber security. He has held positions that cover cyber security risk management, testing, intelligence, architect, program management and is a contributing author positions at various large organizations. As the fourth member of the Gold Team Executive Council, he helps ensure that the game is built in a balanced and fair way.
• Quicksand - Former Blue teamer who learned to build, then to break, then to own, then to build stronger, then to break. Now Dev Team Lead and Gold Team key contributor.
• Uplink - I need to know what happened at Roswell. Contact me @uplink_snafu
• Matir - an all-out geek that eats CTF for breakfast...
• iDigitalFlame - a major part of the Scorebot dev team, a co-contributor to its core component, the SBE.
• Huzar - a long-time staffer with great skills and even greater potential. He's helped build and run many a game, improving what we do at every step.
• Myssfit - new to the game but full of energy, drive, and potential, she's already an essential part of the team.
• ZeroBitSmith - been doing security work for ~6 years, mostly focused on incident response and detection infrastructure. He's new to doing PvJ, but had a fantastic time, and is really looking forward to helping make it a great experience for everyone in there future! Super excited to join the team!
• OldSchoolNoise - a long time veteren of the IT business, recently transitioning with gusto to the security side of things. A great head for hardware and systems administration, this fine gent brings a great deal to the PvJ Family.

Our staff members on Blue Team are here to help. These Pros will get you trained and ready for the combat to begin on game day, then lead you and support you through the fire once the packets start flying...

• imp0ster - Long time Linux nerd turned Blue Team Pro/Red Team Hobbyist. Likes whiskey. Prefers sleep to breakfast.
• MalwareMama - Better at asking for forgiveness than permission. Breaks things just for fun.
• dmfr - Security engineer. Eats souls for breakfast.
• techtonic - InfoSec Engineer and all-out techie. Builds networks in his sleep and eats ALL the Packets for breakfast.
• Rujo - Long time Blue Teamer, people leader, and aspiring Red Teamer. PvJ Blue Range Engineering Lead and wise guru.
• Lazzarus - Just another hacker. Talks in l33tsp3@k unironically and signs his signature with a forkbomb.
• Buzzsaw - Port forwarding is not a crime. Brings network shenanigans to the team. Punch and Pie > Coffee & Cake.
• Needs a Mulligan - hitting the reset button on his career at 30 he dove head first into IT and has focused on the Blue side. Lock down all the things :)
• Spike Roche - Been in the IT field for a long time. Recently started Blue Team role. All around tech enthusiast.
• Dook - Aussie/Brit pentester who loves his CTFs
• Phantasm - Blue teamer trying to learn how to blue team.
• Watchdog - Windows nerd but isn’t scared to mix it up with Linux. Will try to script as many things as possible.

Pros V Joes has a standing Redcell of awesome, full-time, professional pen testers!

• t1v0 - a dedicated hacker, security researcher and avid CTF gamer. t1v0 has been playing on the Pros V Joes red cell for the several years and looks forwards to pwning blue cell for many years to come...
• Promina - 2o year DoD vet, Instructor, Cyber Patriot Mentor, CTF gamer & Red Teamer. Always looking for a challenge!
• ifounditthisway - software developer and security researcher, and I eat the despair of orphans and lost pets for breakfast.
• Anarkyx - Infosec junkie trying to learn more.
• niden - Medic turned hacker, loves breaking stuff and learning how to fix it.
• Brimstone - Participating in Prosvjoes since 2017, brimstone enjoys CTFs year round, whether hosting at local DEFCON and 2600 meetings, or solving them alone or with friends.
• 3ndG4me - Offensive security nerd, security researcher, and pentester with a heavy background in software development. When he's not hacking companies or doing research, he's either playing CTFs, or writing hardcore music. Never sleeps enough.
• 0xn00b: Hacker and breaker of things. Especially enjoys delivering Nyan Cats to Blue teams
• Faultline - Five years of OffSec has only taught him that there is much more to learn. Always looking for the next stealthy backdoor.
• Children Of Init - The more I learn about computers and security, the more I realize I don't know much about computers and security
• Cale - pop shells not alert()
• Huffy - IT Security specialist with over 6+ years’ experience. Enthusiastic penetration tester with a wide range of talents, built skills based on the principle that offensive security is the most effective security
• Benny - Security Researcher and Engineer who loves shells
• DeltaCharlie - Fluent in shenanigans and a pro at breaking things, plays with computers sometimes.
• Jon - Been playing PvJ as part of Red Team since 2013. Enjoys learning, knowledge sharing, and breaking
• webyeti - Jack of all trades, master of some. Usually found hunched over a glowing screen in the dark or stomping through the wilderness. This is the mystery of the webyeti
• PathetiQ - Appsec pentester and hacker since mid '90s. Trying to get into fuzzing he's also into Purple Teaming.
• Cicadamikoto - a red teamer who enjoys finding odd ways to deviously break things.
• 74rkus - Founder of BSidesSLC, presently helping with HackWest while also doing so much for PvJ
• Mostly Harmless - Spent about 10 years as a sysadmin and moved into security and pentesting. Participated in several private and government exercises as a red team member.
• toomanybananas - Malware sommelier looking to expand his cellar

In 2016 we've started a permanent crew of Gray Team Pros to help the volunteers at future games. Thanks to Mark and Guy for stepping up!

• mark_tangent - Hacker, pentester, security consultant. Done some things I'm not proud of, and a few I am - what they have in common is they usually involved breaking something.
• Guy Edri - Digital Forensics investigator, H@cker, Reverse Engineering and whiskey junkie. If you got hacked, I AM your DFiR GUY with 25 years experience
• Malloc - Software Engineer turned Hacker, currently wearing the hat of Security Consultant. Enjoys breaking things, and occasionally putting them back together (with a few modifications).

We've just started a new color, Green! These Staff members will be responsbile for our Associates, the probationary members who show promise but need further opportunity to grow into the role and prove themselves as ready for Staff membership.

• 0xdecae - Friendly neighborhood mushroom just looking to turn spores into shells
• Overclock - Current college infosec student learning to learn as much as I can, have fun learning, and share all I learn.

On Sabbatical

• Starling - A veteran defender who likes to break things in interesting ways, he brings 20 years of defense-in-depth experience to the playing field.
• Wishper - SysAd backgrounds, recovering DBA, tinfoil hats with waxed-paper liner for extra protection. Pulling together diverse teams is part of the fun. Eats bacon for breakfast.
• Gi0cann - has been with us since the start, and has put in countless hours to build and maintain the infrastructure. He is a long time contributor to the scoring engine we use, and is very skilled and upcoming hacker and infosec pro.
• ahhh - Blue Pro extraordinaire who really knows his stuff
• ruckerlk - A member of the Gold Team Executive council, with strong experience in the industry.
• gambite - hacker at heart. Always building or breaking software and a co-contributor to the SBE.
• Rauchoy - a key member of PvJ for many years, she's helped us in many important ways, including laying the groundwork for our CTF automation software (not yet released). She's an excellent security practitioner and someone we are lucky to have on staff.
• Dr. Marvin Candle - freshmen and security analyst for the ███. kernel panic is a constant but I'm here to learn... and to steal memes.
• gepeto42 - an experienced security professional who has been a consultant, security engineer, security architect and blue team manager. With an IT background, his strength is around setting up well managed infrastructure and detecting the bad stuff! His terrible skills as a pentester are also very useful to find out very basic, lame bugs in your code.
• tournikit - Carefully prepares memos on commonly-used passwords. Secured the garbage file, sent a flu-shot, removed a Zero Bug, and stopped multiple GPI and FSI viruses before breakfast. Also, eats breakfast.

Other Contributors

Over the years, there have been a number of outstanding people who have donated their time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears to help build this CTF and make it what it is today, as well as what it will be tomorrow.

We'd like to give a shout out to PhobosJ, h4zm4t, and Sail0rl00n for their fantastic contributions

Prior years' PvJ CTFs

---

PvJ @Home May 2020

---

PvJ BSidesDE 2019

---

PvJ BSidesDC 2019

---

PvJ BSidesLV 2019

---

PvJ BSidesDE 2018

BSidesDC 2018

Final Scores

Team Name	HingleMcCringleberry	MeeseeksAndDestroy	PopPopRet	RaidersOfTheLostArp
Team Score	652282	778136	615063	874927

BSidesLV 2018

Final Scores

Team Name	KnightsWhoSayNi	:(){ :|:&};::	PaisleyScratcHMonkeys	ArcanumExNihilo
Team Score	118698	100407	94779	258884

BSLV 2018 Sponsors

Thanks to Wilmington University for hosting the CTF

Thanks to Maven Security for supporting the CTF

Thanks to Palo Alto Networks for donating NGFW VMs and the support of one of their subject matter experts

2018

HackWest 2018

Full Day 1 Packet Capture

Full Day 2 Packet Capture

Day 1 Final Scores

Day 2 Final Scores

HackWest 2018 Sponsors

---

BSDE 2017 Sponsors

Thanks to Wilmington University for hosting the CTF

Thanks to Maven Security for supporting the CTF

Thanks to Palo Alto Networks for donating NGFW VMs and the support of one of their subject matter experts

2017

BSidesDE 2017

Full Event Packet Capture

Palo Alto NGFW Goodies

Day 2

Day 1

Final Scores

Packet Capture

Palo Alto NGFW logs

---

BSDE 2017 Sponsors

Thanks to Wilmington University for hosting the CTF

Thanks to Maven Security for supporting the CTF

Thanks to Palo Alto Networks for donating NGFW VMs and the support of one of their subject matter experts

Thanks to Strategic Cyber LLC for supporting the CTF

Thanks to SecureWorks for their Red Team support

BSidesLV 2017

BSLV 2017 Sponsors

Thanks to Wilmington University for hosting the CTF

Thanks to Maven Security for supporting the CTF

2016

PCAPs

2016 BSidesLV PCAP

Final Scores

team name	Infinite Improbability	The SYNdicate	Team Machine	JMP-ESP
Day 1 total	17,860	20,788	20,943	19,886
Day 2 total	3,114	20,148	-299,571	-24,335
Grand Total	20,974	40,936	-278,628	-4,449

Sponsors

We’d like to thank RSA for the donation of their appliance, without which the PCAPs from the 2016 Pros V Joes CTF would not be available.

Many thanks ot Maven Security for the donation of many hours of their employee's time to help prepare and run the 2016 BSLV Pros V Joes CTF. Without that contribution, the game would not have been nearly as successful!

Above all, we'd like to thank Wilmington University for the continued use of their facilities to host our CTF.

The Scoring Bug

This year, we had the misfortune to deal with a critical bug in Scorebot, the program that we use to run the ProsVJoes CTF.  This bug seriously impacted the scores displayed on the game board, which was inaccurately representing the state of the game for both days.

Right up front, I would like to personally apologize to all of our players for this flaw, and for the ill feelings this may have caused.  I have never seen a Pros V Joes CTF where so many people put in so much effort for so long before the actual game.  It is only natural that these fine people have an emotional investment in the game, and so may have been extremely disappointed in the final results once they were published on Twitter.  

Unfortunately, the bug is what is, and I can only do the best I can to make it right and fair after the fact, now that this year’s game has concluded.

As a small mercy, the bug was isolated in scope to only the ticket scoring portion of the game. The rules state that players must close tickets as a part of the game. To score them on this, the scoring software monitors the open and closed tickets. The design had been that the open tickets a Blue Team had would cost them 50 points per service scoring round (about 3 minutes, on average).

Here’s where the bug comes in.

Scorebot was docking each team 50 points per service round for every closed  ticket.

The bug was discovered on day two by one of our volunteers this year, Gambite, so a big shout out to him.

Unfortunately, no way exists to handle this bug during run time.  Once Scorebot starts, that’s it, she’s off and running for the duration. So our only choice was to fix things after game play stopped.

For the second day, we had the entire ticket database - every flag, when each was opened, and when each was closed.  So, we could go back and calculate what the final ticket score was for day two.

For the first day, we had no such advantage.  Historically, we wipe the ticket database at the start of day two, so that the prior day’s tickets are no longer counted, since each day’s game play is independent.   While scorebot generates a great deal of log data to track almost every event in the game, the ticket code does not currently log open / closed tickets for every scoring round.  That’s bug number two.   This was a simple, yet damaging oversight in the code base that will be corrected before the next game.

So, in the end, we were able to recalculate the correct scoring for day two, but we did not have the data needed to do the same for day one.

So what did the numbers look like for day two?  Here’s what they were, and what they changed to:

team name	Infinite	SYNdicate	Team Machine	JMP-ESP
Old Tickets	-198,000	-156,350	-63,650	-297,350
New Tickets	-4,250	-14,900	-314,750	-14,000

As can be seen, this is a drastic change.  Again, it is a consequence of the bug counting closed tickets as open when calculating the amount of points to take away each service round.

As a result, here’s what day two looks like after taking these new scores into account:

team name	Infinite	SYNdicate	Team Machine	JMP-ESP
services	20,464	20,648	19,779	20,165
flags	600	15,400	7,600	-3,500
tickets	-198,000	-156,350	-63,650	-297,350
beacons	-13,700	-1,000	-12,200	-27,000
Old Total	-190,636	-121,302	-48,471	-307,685
New Tickets	-4250	-14,900	-314,750	-14,000
New Ticket Total	3114	20,148	-299,571	-24,335

For day one, we did not have the data needed to make that sort of a recalculation.  As a result, our only options were to count the data as is, or discard that part of the score entirely.

We chose to discard the tickets, which seemed the most fair to the teams that had been diligent in closing their tickets.  Here is what day one looks like, with that choice:

team name	Infinite	SYNdicate	Team Machine	JMP-ESP
services	21,360	20,588	19,943	20,086
flags	400	1,400	2,100	2,600
tickets	-94,800	-100,950	-64,950	-104,750
beacons	-3,900	-1,200	-1,100	-2,800
total	-76,940	-80,162	-44,007	-84,864
total w/o tickets	17,860	20,788	20,943	19,886

So, adding up the adjusted first and second day scores as described above, we come up with the results that were published on Twitter:

team name	Infinite	SYNdicate	Team Machine	JMP-ESP
Day 1 total	17,860	20,788	20,943	19,886
Day 2 total	3,114	20,148	-299,571	-24,335
Grand Total	20,974	40,936	-278,628	-4,449

I have personally had multiple conversations with various Blue Pros and Blue Joes from multiple teams on this topic.  Thus far, everyone I have explained the circumstances to was understanding about the difficult choices that had to be made.  Indeed, three members from Team Machine, undeniably the group that was most impacted by this issue, have agreed to come on staff in spite of this snafu.

Regrettably, my team and I can do nothing about this issue beyond what the solution just described.  What we can do, however, is work hard to ensure our future games in the remainder of this year and into next do not suffer from this, nor from any other such egregious flaw.  To that end, we’re re-doubling our efforts to clean up the existing 2.x code train, while also restarting effort on the new 3.0 architecture.  We will be doing more code reviews and testing, working hard to do our best to prevent a recurrence.  Of course, mistakes will happen, but we intend to learn and improve from this one.

To that end, I am pleased to announce that Gambite, the volunteer who found the bug and helped me calculate the  correct scores, has signed on to our permanent staff as part of the Pros V Joes dev team.  

---

2015

The 2015 Pros V Joes CTF was our largest yet, with 44 players and 18 volunteers contributing to make the biggest CTF BSLV has ever seen! Everyone participating did remarkably well. Thanks all for playing, and I hope to see you next year at BSLV 2016!

Final scores

Team	Score
Endtroducing	8,862
Labrynth Guardians	33,785
Castle Keep	-20,781
Salty Goats	1,831

Sponsors

Many thanks ot Maven Security for the donation of many hours of their employee's time to help prepare and run the 2015 BSLV Pros V Joes CTF. Without that contribution, the game would not have been nearly as successful!

We'd like to thank Bijoti for the donation of their appliance, without which the pcaps gathered in 2015 would not have been possible!

Above all, we'd like to thank Wilmington University for the continued use of their facilities to host our CTF.

PCAPS

Full pcaps of the BSLV2015 PVJCTF will be posted shortly. Please stay tuned and watch this space...

---

2014

Sponsors

We'd like to thank Endace for the loan of their network traffic capture appliance, without which the posted pcaps would not have been possible!

Above all, we'd like to thank Wilmington University for the continued use of their facilities to host our CTF.

We were able to obtain exclusive pictures of what the game looked like through the eyes of Redcell...

PCAPS

PCAPs from the event are now available! Team Dentata Team Pequeninos

---

2013

Sponsors

We'd like to thank Wilmington University for the use of their facilities to host our CTF.

PCAPS

PCAPs from the event are now available!