Flag Farming

Flag farming is the process of registering fake teams for the sole purpose of collecting flags from the checker, to be submitted by the offending team.

Flag farming is a particularly difficult issue with online A/D CTFs, since it is practically impossible to enforce a single team per player.

An offending team may register multiple fake teams ahead of time and collect flags from them during the CTF without ever knowing how to exploit the service.

Furthermore, to prevent other teams from exploiting their fake teams, offending teams may use firewalls that filter outbound flags (or other filesystem-based techniques). Even though services will not pass the SLA check this way, they will still receive flags from the checker.

Organizers must have proper monitoring and traffic capture infrastructure to investigate such cases in a timely manner, such that disputes may be settled and the winners declared shortly after end of the CTF.