On Saturday April 11th 130+ participants joined us in the 3rd edition of our yearly ctf. During VUCTF (Capture The Flag) 2026, pariticipants were tasked with defending the VU by solving cybersecurity related challenges to get points and win prizes.
The theme this year involved the ghosts from the WN building basement who were not happy about the demolition, so they convinced the VU to keep WN standing, and to destroy the other buildings like the TenT.
Luckily the ghosts are banished and the VU was saved.
The challenges focused on education, with beginner challenges designed as an entry level, and advanced challenges designed for the experienced hacker, every team solved at least 1 challenge. In total there were 37 challenges in various categories: binary exploitation, binary reverse engineering, web hacking, cryptography, hardware hacking and 0-day.
The participants came from all over the Netherlands including TU Delft, Maastricht university, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, HvA, Eindhoven and more, with a team from TU Delft taking home the price for advanced category and an UvA team taking home the price for the beginner category.
We hope everyone who joined had a fun day, and the organisers thank the VU computer science department for making this possible. We are looking forward to seeing many of you again next year!
To see more pictures, click here.