Publicity and Collabs for your CTF
Getting the word out
For any event to be successful, it is important to publicize the event well. Effective publicity always yields positive results. Recognizing the right target audience and the right platforms to reach that audience is essential. For csictf, we used ctftime.org as the main platform for publicity.
What is CTFtime?
“There are a lot of Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions in our days, some of them have excellent tasks, but in most cases, they are forgotten just after the CTF finished. We decided to make some kind of CTF archive and of course, it’ll be too boring to have just an archive, so we made a place, where you can get some another CTF-related info — current overall Capture The Flag team rating, per-team statistics etc” — https://ctftime.org/about
CTFtime is a platform on which you can post your CTF event and find information about upcoming or past CTFs. You can also find cool stats like top-ranking teams, your team’s world ranking, the ratings of other CTFs, etc. Posting your CTF on CTFtime is arguably the best publicity you can get, for any CTF.
The Process
Posting a CTF on CTFtime is a 2 part process.
- Create a CTF
- Create an event for the CTF
Create a CTF
Note: You would not need to do this if you have an approved CTF already.
To create a CTF you need to visit the For organizers page under the contact us tab, which will take you to this page: https://ctftime.org/event/mail.
Once you fill in the necessary details, you can click on Send. It takes about a week for the maintainers to approve the CTF.
Create an event for your CTF
Once you have an approved CTF, you need to create an event for your CTF. You can visit https://ctftime.org/event/new/ to do the same.
To know about the Scoreboard feed and Oauth endpoint feeds, you can check out https://ctftime.org/for-organizers/#feed.
Once you click on Save and Continue, you have to wait for another week (at most) for your CTF event to be approved. Then, it shows up on the CTFtime Upcoming Events page. You should finally have a page which looks like this: https://ctftime.org/event/1081
Note: The approval time varies depending upon how active the maintainers of CTFtime are when you post your CTF.
You’re all set. Your event is on CTFtime — the biggest platform for information about CTFs. Keep reading to know more about publicity and sponsorship.
More Publicity
We also publicized the event on social media platforms likes Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. It is key to maintain a strong social media presence as it leads to an increased influx of participation because of its easy accessibility. We used our chapter, CSI-VIT’s official accounts for the same. CSI-VIT is a student chapter based at VIT University, Vellore. We organize a wide range of events ranging from technical to non-technical. To know more, check out our official website.
Reaching out to other Organizations
Every event is more exciting and fun when there are cool prizes up for grabs. It is important to collaborate with other organizations because it helps you with your event visibility and credibility. It helps you to build your relationship with the target audience and generates media exposure.
We followed a simple approach of finding companies associated with cybersecurity and reaching out to them through cold emailing or a particular point of contact.
We’ve noticed that the following companies frequently sponsor CTFs:
- Google Cloud (https://g.co/cloud)
- Hack the Box
- TryHackMe
- Trail of Bits
You can have your infrastructure and prizes sorted if you can get the right sponsors. It is important to start early because the process takes a bit of time, depending upon the organization.
That’s all folks!
You’ve publicized your event, gathered amazing prizes, and have some great challenges up your sleeve. But have you built your platform yet? Here’s how we built it, hope this helps:
