Introduction

By participating in the TACOPS 2025 (the “Competition”), you are agreeing to fully comply with the Competition Rules. If you do not agree to the terms as stated, you must discontinue participating in the Competition.

Amendments

The organizers of the Competition may modify the Competition Rules at any time and with immediate effect. In the event of a modification, the organizers will announce such changes through the event notification system and/or the Discord server.

Competition Eligibility

Individuals participating in the Competition (the “Participant”) shall:

Form a team alone or with up to (4) Participants (“Teams”); and Have an account registered on the CTF platform at tacops.netsoc.ca. Purchased a Ticket to the event;

Divisions

There are two divisions, the "Open" and the "Ontario Tech University" (OTU) divisions. Teams are enrolled by default into the Open division. In order to enroll in the OTU division, each Participant in the Team must be formally enrolled at the Ontario Tech University (Oshawa, Ontario, Canada). The organizers reserve the right to verify the enrollment status of any Participant at any time during the Competition. In order to accept a prize under the OTU division as per student union rules you must currently be a full time student and/or paying full time student union fees.

Prize Eligibility

Teams in the Open division are eligible for prizes in that division. Teams in the OTU division are eligible for prizes in the OTU division. If a OTU division team wins a prize and there is less then 4 people the remaining prizes will be given to the next Top individual player overall from Ontario Tech.

Prizes

Open Division: 1st Place: 500$ for team 2nd Place: 350$ for team 3rd Place: 200$ for team

OTU Division: 1st Place: Packet Squirrel Elite Edition (course included) 2nd Place: Proxmark-3 Bundles + TryHackMe Subscriptions for each member 3rd Place: Maltronix-3 Bundle + TryHackMe Subscriptions for each member

Top Player from 1st/2nd year (1 prize) Flipper

Top Player from 3rd/4th year (1 prize) *** Student who are in their "5th year etc would be look at in regards to their "Course year" Flipper

Lock Picking Challenge Top 3 times will receieve a lock picking set

Raffle Prizes will be provided throughout the day. Once you win a raffle prize your name will be removed from the draw.

Sponsor Raffles will be seperate from the rest of the raffles.

Rules

The flag format is tacops{...} unless otherwise specified.

Do not share or post any flags or solutions publicly during the CTF.

Attacking event infrastructure (DoS/DDoS) is strictly prohibited.

Brute-forcing flags on the event website is prohibited.

Automated fuzzing tools (e.g. dirbuster) are not allowed for any challenges.

Cross-team collaboration is not allowed. Do not discuss challenges with members from other teams.

Do not interfere with other teams by attacking their machines or other undesignated targets.

All University and Student union rules must be abided by.

Any violation of the rules will result in immediate disqualification of the Team. The organizers reserve the right to disqualify teams if they are suspected of breaking the rules.