Hacky Holidays

Unlock the City | Mission Briefing

You’ve been officially chosen to compete in Unlock the City from 8 July till 26 July.

Help! The smart city is in trouble. An A.I. algorithm went rogue in the once so peaceful, intelligent city. It's chaos out there.

To regain control and restore peace, we need a group of talented hackers. Each hacker or hacking team will unlock the city in phases by solving a set of challenges in four city districts. The city council has announced that the event's winner will be appointed "Mayor" of the city to sweeten the deal. Additionally, the best hacker in a particular district will become the "Sheriff" for that district.

Can we count on you to unlock the city?

Join us now

What is Hacky Holidays?

Hacky Holidays is an online Capture The Flag game where you can test and improve your skills with all sorts of challenges (technical puzzles) related to cybersecurity and emerging technologies. Each of the challenges has a task description which give you a clue on how you can solve the particular challenge. An example challenge could be a web application in which you need to find a vulnerability that gives you administrative access. When you have successfully solved a challenge you will be given a flag, which is a piece of text, most of the times formatted as following: CTF{…}. When you find the flag you can enter it under the challenge description’s input field and you will be allotted the points assigned to the challenge. Each flag gives you a certain number of points that are counted towards your total score. Your score and those of other players and teams can be seen on the scoreboard of the event.

How you can join Hacky Holidays

The event is open from 8 July till 26 July. You can participate in the event as an individual or as a team with a maximum of four members. Participants are able to register and invite others to their team once the event is live.

Participants can join the competition by going to hackyholidays.io. Only a PC/laptop is required, and your favourite (hacking) tools and software (e.g. using Kali Linux). After signing up for the event, participants will receive access to all sorts of challenges in different categories such as web application hacking, cryptography, network security, cloud security, hardware hacking and reverse engineering.

If you have any questions about the event, feel free to contact the Hackazon team via hackazon@deloitte.com.

Why you should join Hacky Holidays

You can win a cool prize for solving the most challenges or creating a write-up, visit https://hackyholdays.io to find out what you can win.

Moreover, you will learn a lot about the various cybersecurity topics introduced in the game, by solving challenges and capturing the flags with a difficulty level ranging from beginner to expert. Some of the categories and protocols that will be covered are mobile application reversing, web hacking, cloud infrastructure hacking, quantum computing, IOT printed circuit board reverse engineering, network analysis, ICS protocol analysis and hacking, forensics, binary exploitation, programming challenges, cryptography, open source intelligence, machine learning, red teaming and infrastructure hacking.

Solve challenges for a living

Does solving challenges during work time sound too good to be true? At Deloitte Cyber Risk Services it's part of your daily job. The skills that you learn solving hacking challenges are quite important in our job. Therefore, we train our hackers and cybersecurity specialists regulary on our own Hackazon platform. Interested in working for Deloitte?

Find our vacancies here.

Hackazon by Deloitte

Hackazon is a platform developed by Deloitte which allows both students and professionals to constantly refresh and improve their technical cyber skills based on the latest developments in cybersecurity.

The Hackazon platform covers a broad range of cyber topics through challenge-based activities. The challenge materials are perfect for cyber students, developers, IT engineers, incident responders, security analysts and penetration testers but also has material to improve the security awareness for anyone without a technical focus.

For more information please visit the Hackazon page.