General
General CTF resources and tools
This chapter contains resources that train you for CTFs in general. These include past CTFs, general tools that you might use during a CTF, and other things too broad to fit into one category. For category-specific tools and resources, make sure to check out the appropriate chapters!
General resources
picoCTF
picoCTF is a CTF competition run by people at Carnegie Mellon University. Their website also contains resources for getting into CTFs, as well as previous years' competitions that you can tackle. Highly recommended for beginners.
Cyber FastTrack and CyberStart
https://www.cyber-fasttrack.org/
https://play.cyberstart.com/dashboard
Possibly the most beginner friendly cybersecurity resource on this list. Some of the skills learned here are too basic to show up on CTFs, but they're still worth learning. Contact a team captain to join the PBR group on CyberStart.
John Hammond
https://youtube.com/c/JohnHammond010
LiveOverflow
https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveOverflow/videos
ACM at UCLA Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@ACMUCLA/videos
UCSD Cyber Discord
https://acmurl.com/cyberdiscord
Awesome CTF
https://github.com/apsdehal/awesome-ctf
b0ilers welcome to CTF
https://github.com/b01lers/welcome-to-ctf
CTF 101
Over The Wire
https://overthewire.org/wargames/
Imaginary CTF
Tools
pwntools
https://docs.pwntools.com/en/stable/
A Python library that helps with writing CTF scripts. You'll be using this a lot.
Installing Pwntools on M1 Macs.
A common installation problem with pwntools on M1 Macs is because capstone, a dependency of pwntools, fails to build. The fix for this is the following.
brew install cmake
pip install pwntools
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExploitDev/comments/13ixkoy/unable_to_install_pwntools_on_mac_m1/
CyberChef
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
CyberChef describes itself as "The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis". Very useful.
WSL
Lets you use the Ubuntu terminal on Windows.
ipython
An interactive shell for Python that offers enhanced features for code execution and display.