BadAdmin vs DC34 CTF

Servers crash. Cables come loose. Racks overheat. And you're the only admin on call. BadAdmin is a quick, hands-on sysadmin game: 32 servers in a rack, a monitoring screen above them and you in the middle. Flip power switches, plug cables back in, restart hot servers before they crash and reset broken cooling units – as fast as you can. THREE MODES • TIME – 90 seconds, as little downtime as possible. No two rounds are alike: some are quiet, some are pure stress. • SURVIVAL – No clock. Failures keep coming faster. With 8 servers down at once it's Game Over. How long can you hold out? • CHILL – No clock, no score, no pressure. Keep the servers running at your own pace. MORE THAN TAPPING • Overheating: a hot server counts up to 100 °C. Restart it in time, or it crashes and heats up the server next to it. • Cooling units: when one fails, the servers around it heat up twice as fast. • Traffic spikes and several failures at once in Time and Survival. YOUR CAREER Every fix earns XP. Climb the ladder from Intern to Helpdesk, Junior Admin, Sysadmin, Senior Sysadmin and all the way to Head of IT. AFTER EVERY SHIFT An incident report on old-school printer paper: downtime, average time to recovery, longest outage – and how close you came to your record. ALSO • Made for iPhone and iPad • Light or dark server room • Vibration can be switched off Have you tried turning it off and on again?

DC34 CTF is a capture-the-flag game built for DEF CON 34. Fourteen channels are dark. Your job is to light them up. Download before the con. The app locks until the convention opens. When the doors open at LVCC West Hall in Las Vegas on August 7, it unlocks and the game begins. FOURTEEN CHANNELS. ONE FINAL TARGET. Every channel is a different kind of puzzle. Some are cryptographic. Some are physical. Some require hardware your phone didn't know it would be using. No hints. No walkthrough. Figure it out. The challenges span XOR ciphers, steganography, DTMF tone analysis, radio direction finding, Bluetooth beacon hunting, geolocation, reverse image search, physical navigation, NFC, speech recognition, and more. Your phone's full sensor suite is in play — camera, microphone, GPS, accelerometer, compass, Bluetooth, NFC. PRIZES The first three players to complete all fourteen channels and claim the final flag receive physical prizes: gold, silver, and copper coins. Finishers four through thirteen get pins. Your rank is permanent — logged to the live leaderboard the moment you scan the hand. THE LEADERBOARD A live in-app finishers board tracks every player who completes the game, ranked by completion time. Watch it fill up in real time. THERE IS MORE The app has secrets that have nothing to do with the flags. Some people will find them. Most won't. REQUIREMENTS iOS 17 or later. Game Center must be enabled — the app authenticates silently at launch. Several challenges require network access, Bluetooth, NFC, location services, camera, and microphone. Grant permissions as the game asks for them or miss the challenges that need them. The app is locked until August 7, 2026 at 9:00 AM PT. Show up at DEF CON 34, LVCC West Hall, Las Vegas. You can play anywhere, but final flag unlocking prizes is only available in-person.