What I Wish I Knew Before I Was a Linux Systems Administrator
When I was 13 years old in a middle school class, I was tasked with looking up careers and developing a plan for what I wanted to be when I grew up. For a lot of kids, this was a difficult question, but ever since I started on Windows Millennium and played Fury3 at a young age, I knew I wanted to work with computers for a living. At that age, I hadn't started coding, and I wouldn't write my first console application (in C#) until late high school. Most of my interest was in hosting game servers and file shares for my friends and family.
BSides Fort Wayne 2025 Conference Experience
The Fort Wayne BSides Information Security Conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana, took place on June 7th of 2025. I was privileged enough to play a large part in the development of the CTF challenges as well as the badge that was given to each attendee at the conference.
BSides Fort Wayne 2025 Conference - Badge Challenge 6 Writeup
The first and most easy flag for the BSides Fort Wayne CTF badge category would be the simple enumeration step of looking in the public GitHub repo for the flag.txt. Additionally, this flag.txt is provided on every single device handed out. Simply breaking out of the running program into the REPL interface and exploring around with the OS library is enough to find the flag.
BSides Fort Wayne 2025 Conference - Badge Challenge 5 Writeup
The 2025 Fort Wayne BSides badge had another challenge that was intended to be relatively easy for anyone who was able to access the REPL interface, and poke around MicroPython instance. An undocumented method was added to the customer C code user module that contained the other badge challenge code. If a user was able to find this undocumented method they would be rewarded with a flag.
BSides Fort Wayne 2025 Conference - Badge Challenge 4 Writeup
Badge challenge number 4 was the challenge to seriously differentiate the contenders that would perform well on the badge challenges. This challenge was not actually solved at any point, so I'm happy to provide my solution here. An app was placed on the badges that would start `badgechal.chal4()` as a thread and during execution it would also monitor a global variable. The user would see the badge begin to flash lights and start beeping out morse code.
BSides Fort Wayne 2025 Conference - Badge Challenge 3 Writeup
The 2025 Fort Wayne BSides badge was used in the CTF for another challenge called 'Blinky Lights'. This was another challenge created as a medium difficutly challenge. The intention is to create a challenge where the user needs to write their own app on the badge that will interact with the hidden C code.