CSCTF 2026
- Starts
- Ends
- Runs for
- 48 hours
- Format
- Jeopardy (online)
- Rating weight
- Unrated by CTFtime
- Teams registered
- 4
Run by Mirachron, with prizes listed on CTFtime.
What the organisers say
"CSCTF 2026: Total Warfare" is an international, online, free jeopardy-style CTF focused on realistic cybersecurity scenarios inspired by critical infrastructure, defense, and modern adversary tactics. Challenges cover web, pwn, crypto, reverse engineering, forensics, misc, Linux, Windows, and operational security, with scenarios connected to energy, telecom, healthcare, finance, and defense environments.
Prep briefing
What past editions were made of
Counted across 303 challenges from 2026, 2025, 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 35%(50)
- forensics 18%(25)
- web 16%(23)
- crypto 13%(19)
- rev 9%(12)
- pwn 6%(9)
- osint 1%(2)
- stego 1%(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
Forensics
Start with the file's own claim about itself, then with what is appended after it ends. Both are one paste away.
- File type identifier by magic bytes
- Hex viewer and hexdump
- ZIP archive inspector
- PCAP analyzer for CTF network forensics
- Memory dump, disk image and registry hive analysis
New to this? Read File forensics and carving, Network forensics, Memory and disk forensics
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
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.
- iForensicsforensics · 2025 · 4 writeups
- Hotline Miamiunknown · 2025 · 3 writeups
- Logsforensics · 2026 · 3 writeups
- Straightforwardweb · 2025 · 3 writeups
- This Is Finecrypto · 2026 · 3 writeups
- 1forensics · 2025 · 2 writeups