 We are at Hack Fortress, easily one of my favorite contests at DEFCON, because it combines kind of this weird mixture of hacking and gaming. And one of my favorite judges, what can you tell me about it? So, Hack Fortress is a hybrid gaming CTF. So we've got six player, we've got six TF2 players on each team, competing in a mostly normal TF2 round. Those teams are supported by four hackers. Hackers are doing web security, net security, physical challenges like lock picking, flex cuffs, forensics, web challenge, cryptography, like you guys always have this massive gambit of challenges. And now the difficulty is often sometimes really hard. And then other times though, you put easy ones in there too. I mean we've got basic stuff, I mean OWASP top 10 style puzzles are still in there. So one of the things I noticed, so we have the gamers, they are gaming away. But every once in a while they get a boost, they get like a power up. How are they getting that power up? So the hackers have access to the Hack Fortress Hack economy store. It's a special in-game interface. They can go in, they can buy crits, they can freeze the other team, they can drop a bot in on their team for an extra player. Oh that's so cool. They can block the other hackers from submitting a challenge, providing them from scoring. And they can even swap a player and a hacker. Sometimes this has worked out great for the opposing team, worked out great for the opposing team because they drop a hacker in that's like what is game? How do I TF2? Other times they've dropped in a competitive TF2 player that is also a hacker and they swapped in without missing a beat. And the TF2 player went over and solved the challenge. So the gamers are playing their scoring points, which gives hackers the ability to get hints on the challenges. Hackers are hacking away at the challenges, they get points which then can be used for all these different like disrupts to the team. Can you tell me, but like my favorite challenges, Outflat have been the physical wonky challenges we'll call it. What are some of the ones that have been happening thus far this year? So this year we don't have any of the physical challenges yet, but we do have some in store. I know the one which actually like made me break out into a sweat was you had one of the hackers come and do five burpees. And I had no idea what a burpee was and I'm like so what's a burpee? I'm thinking like okay like I have to like burp the alphabet or something like that. You're like no it's a go down do a push-up jump up. And I was like probably 50 pounds heavier at that time. And I'm just dripping sweat. Another one I remember is you had to lead the crowd. What was it in YMCA? I think we've done that one. My personal favorite was the year Mad Max Fury Road came out. We had we got some silver cake decorating spray. Contestants had to spray the bottom of their face silver as characters in the film did. And Scab Hunt for some reason ended up with the bumper of a car. And so they had to go over to Scab Hunt get the bumper of a car and do a lap around the whole of the contest area holding the bumper. Yelling what? Witness me. Oh my gosh I love this contest. I love the challenges. There's so much work put into it because when you build this it's not just stand up the game stand up hackers but your team built an entire interface to be able to interface the store with like essentially an API within Team Fortress. Can you tell me a little bit about that code? Like how difficult was that to make and has TF2 been like easier to work with? So I can't speak to it exactly because I've not written any of that code myself. Okay. But we have put in massive effort on the scoreboard side. We've written a custom parser to read the TF2 logs, get all the events, feed those back to the scoreboard side of the hack event. We also leverage a admin plugin on the TF2 side so we're able to send those events into TF2. And one of the things I love about this contest too is like it's very visual. One of the things I love about some of the contests some of them like it's hard to show because it's like okay you insert sequel injection or something like that and it just it's on a scoreboard. This one you get to see it. You get to experience it. You have screens behind you. They update live. You get to see bonus and what the information gathering and all the scoring real time. And then at the end of the game how do teams get scored? Because there's now points on both sides. Yeah. So it's both scores combined together and team with a higher score wins. And we've seen it be we've seen at times where both teams both sides of the team have been super balanced and they've been working together to great effort. Other times we've seen that the hackers aren't pulling their weight and the TF2 side is just dominating. Other times it's been TF2 has been outclassed. But the hackers are just knocking everything out of the park. I think it was last year or two years ago we had a single hacker that's still in high school out competing the hacking team on the other side. This isn't the finals. That's incredible. Single-handedly outperforming four other hackers. That's awesome. Hey well thank you so much. Thanks for sharing. Thank you for watching. And as always hack on. Cool. That was great. Thank you so much. Yeah. I know that happened to me like was it three years ago? Whereas single me versus the four other hackers. And that was the one year I think it was it was one of the earlier rounds though where I single handedly beat the other hacking team but it was then this.