BlackHat MEA CTF Qualification 2026
- Starts
- Ends
- Runs for
- 24 hours
- Format
- Jeopardy (online)
- Rating weight
- 8.10 - Rated
- Teams registered
- 134
Run by SAFCSP, with prizes listed on CTFtime.
What the organisers say
Black Hat MEA Capture The Flag (CTF) 2026 ? The Black Hat MEA Capture The Flag (CTF) is the largest cybersecurity competition in the region and officially the largest Capture The Flag competition in the world, recognized with a Guinness World Record.
Prep briefing
What past editions were made of
Counted across 32 challenges from 2025, 2025, 2024, 2023, using the categories the scoreboards themselves used. Two things to hold in mind while reading it. The archive indexes challenges that someone published a solution to, not whole scoreboards, so this is the shape of what people wrote about rather than of everything that was set. And where a scoreboard gave no category the challenge lands in misc, so a large misc slice means “unlabelled” rather than “miscellaneous”.
- misc 29%(5)
- web 24%(4)
- pwn 18%(3)
- crypto 12%(2)
- forensics 12%(2)
- rev 6%(1)
What to have open when it starts
Misc
Misc is whatever did not fit, which in practice means encodings and esolangs. Identify, do not guess.
- Cipher identifier and automatic decoder
- Recipe builder: chain decodes and transforms
- Brainfuck and esolang decoder
- Base64 decoder and encoder
- Regex tester with match offsets and capture groups
New to this? Read Recognising encodings, Misc and esoteric languages
Web
Read the token before you read the source. A session cookie that decodes is the shortest path through half the web board.
- JWT decoder and signature verifier
- Flask session cookie decoder
- HTTP request replayer
- Directory and path scanner
- HTTP security header analyzer
New to this? Read Web attacks and session tokens
Pwn
Get the offset and the libc base mechanically, so the thinking is spent on the chain rather than on arithmetic.
- Cyclic pattern generator and offset finder
- Buffer overflow offset finder
- Libc base address calculator
- ROP gadget finder
- Pwntools exploit script generator
New to this? Read Binary exploitation
Crypto
Have the cipher identifier open on the first paste. Most of the round-one crypto is a classical cipher or an RSA parameter mistake, and both are recognised faster than they are solved.
- Cipher identifier and automatic decoder
- RSA decryption and attack runner
- XOR cipher decoder and key recovery
- Vigenere cipher solver with automatic key recovery
- Modular arithmetic and number theory toolkit
New to this? Read Classical ciphers and frequency analysis, XOR and the cost of reusing a key, RSA and the parameters that break it
The challenges people wrote about most
From previous editions, ordered by how many published solutions each attracted. Reading two solutions to one of these is the closest thing to a warm-up for this event that exists.