Team Inflation

Similar to flag teams, team inflation involves registering multiple fake teams, but instead of submitting their flags, the offending team uses them to influence the value of their own exploits.

Some scoring formulas, such as SaarCTF2024 and ATKLABv2, try to estimate the number of active teams. This can be abused by turning services (or VPN connections) on or off depending on whether the offending team is currently exploiting or not to increase the value of their exploit / reduce the value of others.