I participated in Deadface CTF (capture the flag) this weekend with Psi Beta Rho, UCLA's competitive cybersecurity team. This was my first big CTF and I learned a lot about the different categories of challenges.
While I'm relatively new to CTFs, I've used linux my whole life and I found that helped a lot this weekend, especially in scripting and automation as well as general command line tools.
I found at least one flag in most of the categories, but I really enjoyed the programming and steganography categories.
After the CTF ended, I presented my solution to the "Price Check" problem. A quick overview: I noticed that the data in the provided csv was just 0s or 255s, and I realized that was probably a qr code. The problem also mentioned that users might "scan" something. So I wrote a python script to generate a qr code from the image. The flag was revealed when you scan the qr code.
Can't wait for the next competition in a couple weeks!