The Treasure Hunt Begins Once AgainApr 14

Note: I'm still working on the design of this site, so some links, like the "about" page, doesn't work yet. I'm still making a projects page, but in the meantime visit my GitHub page.

Those of you that participated in my previous "treasure hunts" may remember the cryptic stenography trick from the Harry Potter level. Pretty evil right? Well, they're back again.

For those of you who aren't familiar with my annual contests, here's an blurb from a previous post:

"It began as a simple contest between the two of my friends, seeing who could make the best webpage. Every now and then, we would invite our friends and challenge them to "treasure hunts" on our site. In these treasure hunts we would hide tiny snippets of text in our website and ask our friends to find them. Looking back, we were pretty naive at the moment - each of us (at least me) aspired to create a website that would generate a lot of hits and gain popularity to the point that we were well recognized on the Internet.

 Now, I want to continue this tradition that began a long time ago and was followed again last year.

 This treasure hunt will require you to find a series of codes in order. Your whole goal is to find the spy, who leaves a lot of text codes along the way. Once you find all the text codes, you win."

That treasure hunt was primarily geared towards Google searching and Internet memes. This contest, however, will be focused primarily on security.

Let me explain.

The treasure hunt will include ten different levels (not necessarily in level of increasing difficulty). Each level may be related to a security question or may require you to find the security flaw with the page. In order to go onto the next level, you'll need to obtain a unique text code after discovering the flaw or answer.

My whole goal is to make this as fair as possible, so no programming experience is necessary. But it will be helpful to have a basic understanding of html and what a browser stores (cookies, html files, etc). For all you CIS majors out there, I hope this will make you realize that there is much more to CIS than programming (e.g.: security, design, memes, random tech stuff). For the rest of you, I hope this will be a fun contest designed to teach you that anything is possible, as long as you Google it.

Rules

• The goal of this hunt is to search for codes that will be embedded in webpages (in some way or another).
• All codes should be entered in lowercase.
• This contest will end before reading days.

Thanks to Kings Court ITAs for sponsoring this event (and prizes).

The contest won't begin until next week Friday, but if you want a head start try digging around my site and solve the puzzle, without deobfuscating the obfuscated source code :P.

More details will be given in the next few days.

If you have any questions or need help, feel free to shoot me an email at david[at]dwang.org.