The Qualification Round of the global cyber security competition WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 officially ended on the morning of January 5, 2020, after 24 hours of continuous competition. Not only leading the score board, the United States is also a country with up to 3 teams to the Final Round. Top 10 of the Qualifier are also 2 teams from Vietnam, 2 teams from South Korea and 3 other teams from Russia, India and Germany. This year's competition attracted 739 teams from 84 countries.
Top 10 teams of the Qualifier, also the teams to the Final Round of WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 are perfectblue (USA), DiceGang (USA), More Smoked Leet Chicken (Russia), KingTigerPrawn (Korea), ACEBEAR (Vietnam), BabyPhD (Vietnam), InfoSecIITR (India), JustToPlay (Korea), 0penToA11 (USA), ALLESCTF (Germany) respectively.
The Qualification Round took place with fierce competition. Vietnam, the home country of WhiteHat Grand Prix, made a strong impression as the country with the first team to score points. During the race, the flag of Vietnam was always in the Top 10.
DiceGang from USA or More Smoked Leet Chicken from Russia were also new names for the competition but showed overwhelming performance from the beginning. During the Qualifier, the rankings of the teams did not change too much despite the presence of names in the Top 10 CTFtime such as dcua (Ukraine) or p4team (Poland). In the final minutes, p4team was in the 11th position on the Scoreboard, but the breakthrough efforts did not help the team ranking 4th in the CTFtime rankings to gain a place to the Final Round of this year WhiteHat Grand Prix.
Mr. Nguyen Van Cuong, Head of the WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 challenges, stated: “The special thing in the Qualifier of this year WhiteHat Grand Prix is that the advantage belongs to new players. Following the competition progress, we were also surprised that the expected names such as dcua or p4team, despite great efforts, were unable to go forward. However, the appearance of new names from Germany, Korea and India will make the race of the Final Round more interesting”.
The representative of the Organizer also said that the Top 10 teams to this year's Final Round were from the US, Germany, India, Russia, etc. are all countries with the developed technology. This reflects quite closely to the actual situation and the level of teams.
During the Qualification Round, some technical problems interrupted the system for a period of time. However, this does not affect the "racers". Technical staff of the Organizer was always on duty, timely supporting the teams. Member Thatway of a team responded on a support channel of the Organizer that: “You are so nice and the most responsive support. I'll rate this CTF high because of you my love”.
The Final Round of WhiteHat Grand Prix 06 is expected to take place in middle February 2020 in Hanoi. In addition to the Attack/Defense format like previous ones, it will have the Private Bug Bounty, finding vulnerabilities in popular software and important information systems in Vietnam. With this, in addition to the highest prize worth VND 230 million, teams also have the opportunity to get additional bounties per bug they find.
WhiteHat Grand Prix was first held at the national level in 2014 and began to expand globally since 2015. This is a rare competition organized by Vietnam that is highly appreciated in the world cyber security community, attracting the participation of many leading teams from developed countries such as the US, Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, etc.
