Capture the Flag (CTF)
termsecurityevents
The competitive format in which teams solve security challenges to recover flag strings. Jeopardy style offers categorised puzzles - binary exploitation, reverse engineering, cryptography, web, forensics - while attack-defence gives every team an identical vulnerable network to break into and simultaneously patch.
DEF CON's CTF has run since 1996 and is the field's world championship, with qualifiers feeding a final that teams train for all year. The format turned out to be the best training method anyone has found: it rewards reading unfamiliar code under time pressure, which is the actual job. Attack-defence in particular teaches the lesson no lecture conveys - that you must fix your own copy of the bug while someone is actively using it against you.
Also known as: ctf, jeopardy ctf, attack defense, pwn challenge