Hacktivate: Capture the Flag

What you’ll need

In order for your students to follow along with Hacktivate, your students will need:

• A computer with a modern web browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, or Firefox.
• Access to the JavaScript console in your browser, and also View Source functionality, so students can inspect and adjust page code.
• The ability to download and inspect files locally, such as pictures and scripts.
• Access to CyberChef.

In addition, students who want to complete The Big Hack will need the ability to send and receive email. This might be their own school email address, or it might be temporary access to a teacher account.

We highly recommend giving them access to a high-quality plaintext editor such as VS Code.

Important: All challenges, including those that form The Big Hack final challenge, take place virtually – no real data or websites are affected.

How it works…

What teachers say…

Our goal is to help students across the UK learn critical cyberskills, giving them confidence in their computer abilities, instilling knowledge around security best practices, and inspiring them to choose careers in cyber – all using a fun, challenge-based environment.

Here is what some teachers had to say about it:

• "Using Hacktivate with my sixth form students was a fantastic success that the students really enjoyed - the class was buzzing. It also covered content from the A-level curriculum such as encryption, hashing, SQL, the Internet, ASCII, HTML/CSS/JS and network security. Students loved the competitive nature of the leaderboard, and The Big Hack was a great way to finish it off. Will use this with every Y12 cohort from now on. – Jake Gordon, Cambridge Maths School
• "Hacktivate is an extremely easy way to supplement the core Computer Science curriculum with exciting and challenging team-based challenges that get students learning and applying real-world cyber security skills. We use it each year to inspire our GCSE students to study the subject at A Level and beyond and each year it goes down like a storm." – David Cornell, Eton College
• "Hacktivate has been an excellent resource in my lessons. My students enjoyed the challenges, and don't want to move on to anything else. Hacktivate show students a world within cyber that they had only been able to talk about in the past. The biggest bonus of having Hacktivate available is to encourage independent learning, and to help students pull in knowledge from all the resources they have available. All this for free as well!" – Ian Jones, St John's College, Cardiff
• "Hacktivate is an engaging resource for delivering a range of cybersecurity knowledge and skills. The introductory videos are excellent, providing context and delivering key information to get students started on the challenges. The challenges themselves allow for progression and help develop the critical thinking and research skills required for any going on to take part in the CyberFirst Girls Competition." – James Watts, Oxford High School
• "Hacktivate is an impressive, free resource for educating students in cybersecurity with an engaging hands-on challenge-based approach. We are looking to make good use of it next year with a new cybersecurity lunchtime club to inspire and extend students who are interested in this area and who are often in need of safe and positive opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills." – Paul Baker, The Perse School
• "Hacktivate being free made it quick and easy for teachers to implement within our teaching. Our learners have benefitted from completing the CyberFirst-style flags that have prepared them for entering competitions, and working collaboratively within a team setting. All learners have raised their awareness through the different cybersecurity topics that are challenged within Hacktivate." – Larissa Thomas-Davies, Abertillery Learning Community
• "Hacktivate opened students' eyes to various elements of cybersecurity in a very hands-on way. It has developed their problem-solving skills, and they also have a better understanding of the many ways a malicious actor may wish to access or break a system. If there had been a cost to Hacktivate I simply wouldn’t be able to use it, but Hacktivate being free means it's going to be a standard part of my year 8 curriculum." – Carlo Acosta, King's College School, The Bahamas
• "As a free resource, Hacktivate allowed me to bring high-quality cybersecurity education to my students without trying to obtain funding. The challenges are clever and fun, and lead students to ask to learn more about networking – it's an outstanding resource that creates the conditions for learning that so many students crave. Students were buzzing with collaborative energy as they strived to top the leaderboards!" – Russell Gordon, Lakefield College School, Canada

FAQ

What is the relationship between this website and the Hacktivate app?

Hacktivate exists in two versions, and you can use either or both.

This website is the original version of Hacktivate. It's completely free, works entirely using your web browser, and is available exclusively to schools. It has five tutorial videos, which help students get started. After that, students must use external tools such as CyberChef to figure out and solve the remaining problems.

The app version of Hacktivate is bigger, newer, and more powerful. It's designed to work on Apple devices, it integrates many more tutorials so students learn all the techniques, and it has a much wider range of challenges such as SQL injection, packet sniffing, and interactive Linux terminals. All tools required to solve the challenges are integrated, and it's available to everyone rather than just to schools.

You can download Hacktivate for iPhone, iPad, and Mac here.

How do I create a teacher account?

Please email [email protected] from your school, college, or university email address, providing your full name and the school where you teach, and we'll create a teacher account for you. Once you have that you can log in to start adding students and creating teams.

Note: It's important you use your official school, college, or university email address, so we can verify your status – we will not create an account for a teacher unless we can see exactly which school you represent. We allow only one teacher account per school, so if your school already has an account please use that.

Can my school have more than one teacher account?

No; we simply don't have the resources to handle multiple accounts per school.

Who is Hacktivate for?

Hacktivate is aimed at students who want to tackle real-world cyber challenges in a safe, structured way. We're targeting students aged about 11 through 21, but there's no firm age limit – you're the teacher and you know your students, so if you have a group of older students at university we'd love to have you using Hacktivate.

How does Hacktivate make money if it's free?

It doesn't! Hacktivate has no adverts, has no sponsorship, has no subscription pricing, and indeed has no way to make money. That's because it's not designed to make money, it's just here to help more students learn key cyber skills such as security, cryptography, and coding.

What controls do I have over students and teams?

As a school admin you can create as many teams and student account as you want; they will all be linked to your school. For each team you can determine the maximum question difficulty you want them to face, whether or not they should be visible on your school's leaderboard, whether they should be given hints for free or lose points for using hints, and whether or not they have should have access to The Big Hack final challenge.

In addition, you'll have access to leaderboards you can display on a shared screen, either for individual scores or team scores. These automatically refresh every five seconds, so you can just leave them running.

As a teacher, you'll also see hints and solutions for every challenge, so you can provide extra tips to students as needed.

Can I create test student accounts?

Yes, you can create as many test student accounts as you want. Doing this means you get to try for yourself all the questions students are asked, which is a great way to see things from their perspective.

My school is outside the UK – can I use Hacktivate?

Yes, you can request an account and access all the content. However, our resources are limited because we don't make any money from Hacktivate's operations, which means dedicated support is not available for schools outside the UK. You can still get an account and use the content with your students in schools outside the UK.

I homeschool my child – can I use Hacktivate?

This website is for schools only. For homeschooling parents, please download Hacktivate for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Are the leaderboards public?

As a school admin, you can create as many teams as you want and add as many students to each team. Unless you hide a team and its members from the leaderboard, all teams you create will appear on your school's individual and team leaderboards. These leaderboards are visible only to teams you created, rather than being public to everyone – no other school will see your team or student data.

What is your privacy policy?

Hacktivate, including all challenges and The Big Hack, stores as little data as possible – it's our policy to store what is only absolutely required for the site to work.

• When you log in a cookie will be used to store your active session.
• As students complete challenges or use hints, their progress will automatically be saved on our server. For example, it means we track "on 1st October at 10:02am student 11402 solved challenge 31 and scored 30 points." Without this we could not track which challenges they had solved.
• When you join a team for The Big Hack that team name will also be stored in a cookie.
• Some challenges require you to create or adjust cookie data to get the flag; these are individually marked.
• When adding students, we recommend teachers provide only the first name of each student to avoid them being personally identifiable. You are welcome to provide completely anonymous names if you prefer.
• Any students or teams you create will automatically appear on your school leaderboard unless you hide them. School leaderboards are visible only to teams you created, rather than being public to everyone – no other school will see your team or student data.
• We do not use any third-party analytics, and our web servers do not store access logs.

What are your terms of use?

Hacktivate is a free service, so all we ask is that you use it respectfully. Teachers can add as many students as they want from their school, they can share their login with other teachers from the same school, and they are welcome to reach out to [email protected] if they need help.

If we find that teachers or students are abusing the service, we reserve the right to disable your account. In the unlikely event this happens, you will be contacted with an explanation. Please keep in mind that Hacktivate is a free service – we just don't have the resources to dedicate to fighting abusive users beyond just shutting them down entirely.

Why was Hacktivate created?

Hacktivate was created by Paul Hudson because his daughter and her friends entered a UK competition called CyberFirst Girls. This competition is incredibly inspirational, asking girls from around the UK to complete a range of challenges across coding, cryptography, networking, and more.

However, CyberFirst Girls has one small issue: only a handful of sample questions are released before the competition, which means schools taking part for the first time have little idea what to expect compared to schools that have been in the event for years. So, Paul built Hacktivate as a way of helping his daughter's team prepare for the event.

We're very keen to help as many students as possible enjoy cybersecurity, which is why Hacktivate is now open for everyone, and is free for all UK schools. Whether you use it to help students prepare for another edition of CyberFirst Girls, or just give your class something fun to do at the end of term, we hope you enjoy using this resource!

Note: Hacktivate owes a huge debt of gratitude to CyberFirst Girls – before the competition took place we tried to mimic their structure so that this preparation was as useful as it could be, and after the competition we adjusted some questions to be more closely aligned to the level they had set. Although we've been heavily inspired by CyberFirst Girls and other competitions, everything on Hacktivate was developed from scratch. We highly recommend registering your school for the next event, because we've seen first hand how much girls enjoy it!

Create a Teacher Account