https://zaratec.io/Just a blog for CTF things. 2026-04-12T17:14:26-04:00 zaratec https://zaratec.io/ Jekyll © 2026 zaratec /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-04-12T00:00:00-04:00 2026-04-12T17:13:42-04:00 https://zaratec.io/districtcon-junkyard-101/ zaratec

At DistrictCon 0x01, I competed for the first time in their Junkyard competition - a novel End-of-Life Pwnathon. It was a blast, and I’m really happy I pushed myself to compete in it. During the conference, I had a ton of people come up to me and express interest, but either felt short on time or were unsure how to get started. Let’s break down what it takes to make that possible. Here’s ho...

2026-02-13T00:00:00-05:00 2026-02-13T00:00:00-05:00 https://zaratec.io/windows-ce-tooling/ zaratec

I recently found myself looking at Windows CE devices as part of my DistrictCon Junkyard competition entry, Quacking Between the Lines. (Sidenote - I had a blast and would highly recommend it! I managed to clinch a win for Most Engaging Presentation!) With only 12 minutes to present, I glazed over a lot of the general info and tooling, so I thought to write up more about that. I might do a ...

2022-08-07T00:00:00-04:00 2023-07-04T18:53:46-04:00 https://zaratec.io/googlectf2022-mixed/ zaratec

I really enjoyed this challenge - it was a fun puzzle to figure out! f0xtr0t and I worked on it together, and we were able to contribute different skillsets to solve it. You can see his write-up here, which covers a lot of the tooling side of things I skim over. On to the challenge! We’re given x.pyc and patch. But it seems like we can’t run this .pyc file with the given Python version f...