The Flat Network Society

High quality steganographers

Join the Society today

Introduction

The Flat Network Society is a CTF team founded in September 2019. It consistently obtained the best ranking among French teams and peaked at 11^th worldwide in 2020.
Click here to see the history of the team on CTFtime.org.

After a hiatus that lasted the whole year of 2022, the team would like to recruit new members to stay competitive in the current CTF landscape.

About the team

The team currently consists of 5 members and occasional guests with various level of availability. Most of the members and guests speak French for historical reasons, but the main language for communication within the team is English.

The team uses UTC to accommodate for different timezones.

There is no standardized notation for skill level. The skill level of the team members varies between “I am such a CTF solving machine” and “How did I not think of this?” from one event to the next.
Click here to see the public write-ups made by the team to get your own opinion on the level of the team.

The team maintains and uses CTFNote which is a platform to prepare CTF, organize tasks and share work during CTF. You have probably already used it. (unless you are from ALLES!)
Communication in real time is done through IRC and occasionally Mumble.

About you

Requirements

You are motivated and looking to join a competitive CTF team.
You are ready to spend the major part of a week-end working on CTF challenges.

You are trustworthy and complete the tasks you have committed to doing. You are not afraid of saying that you do not know or cannot do something.

You have great skills in at least one of the usual categories found in CTF:

• cryptography;
• reverse engineering;
• memory corruptions;
• web.

Your level in your "main" category is relatively close to the level of existing members. Too low and you will feel demotivated, too high and you will feel out of place.
(Sorry hellman, it's not you, it's us.)

You have basic knowledge of:

• POSIX environments (Linux, BSD, Mac OS, WSL)
• common protocols (HTTP, TLS, DNS, SMTP…);
• networking (IP, TCP, routing tables…)

You can understand and speak English. You are able to have a conversation on technical topics. (Ideally level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages)
If you can read this page without a translator, this is a good sign.

Nice-to-have

You can travel to most countries hosting CTF without a visa or are willing to fill the eventual paperwork to travel.
You did not write banking malware or similar kind of software.

You can write detailed write-up and are familiar with git.

You can speak French and have enough knowledge of the culture to understand jokes made by sleep-deprived, drunk, hackers.

The recruitment process

If you are interested, send the form below by e-mail to the Society.
Your application will be shared with the members of the Society. Make sure not to include any personal information.
You will receive a reply from the Society telling you if your application has been accepted or not, and why. Feel free to contact the Society again if you see no response after a week.

If your profile looks interesting and nobody vetoes your application, you will be sent the information to an IRC channel to meet and talk with the members.
You will be able to create an account on the Society's CTFNote and play a few trial CTF with the rest of the team.

Depending on various factors, your application will either be accepted or rejected.
If it gets accepted, congratulations, you may now proudly tell your Tinder dates that you joined a group of washed-up CTF players.
If it gets rejected, don't lose hope. That happens! Maybe you will have better luck next time.

Application form