CELL ACTIVATION PENDING

THE MISSION

Public record: the Australian white ibis (Threskiornis molucca) is a native species. Historically rare in urban areas, populations boomed in southeast Queensland from the late 1970s onward. Sea World on the Gold Coast opened in December 1971, and the surrounding wetlands became a noted ibis habitat shortly after. By the 2000s the species was a permanent fixture in the bins of every beachfront food court from Coolangatta to The Spit.

Classified: that’s the cover story.

In December 1971, an alien scout vessel crashed in the wetlands behind what was about to become Sea World. The crew — tall, beaky, omnivorous, hideously well-suited to a humid subtropical climate with abundant tourist chips — adopted the perfect disguise: a native bird already part of the local ecology. They became the urban bin chicken.

By 2000, TipTop Corp — a waste-management conglomerate operating out of a high-rise on Cavill Avenue, suspiciously cosy with every theme park on the coast — had quietly recovered most of the wreck and was reverse-engineering it. Their suspiciously advanced “AI bin-sorting technology” is sold to Dreamworld, Movie World, and Wet’n’Wild. It’s the ship’s nav computer.

It’s now 2026. The mothership is six hours out. The pickup point is the spire of Q1. The crew has one shot.

That’s where you come in. Each team is a cell of operatives. Every flag captured recovers a component. The ship gets rebuilt by the whole room together — but the leaderboard rewards the teams who contribute the most.

You are sitting in Cohort Innovation Space. You are now Cell personnel. Read on.

HOW THE OPERATION RUNS

Two layers

This event runs on two layers at once. They don’t interfere with each other — teams play their own game; the ship gets built as a side effect.

• Competitive layer (leaderboard). Standard CTFd scoring. Points per flag, first-blood bonuses, dynamic decay. Top three cells get prizes.
• Cooperative layer (mothership). Every flag any cell captures contributes one component to a shared mothership on the projector at the front of the room. The room “wins” if enough components come online before the timer runs out.

Wave schedule

Categories → ship systems

Flag format

bin{snake_case_here}. First-blood bonus and dynamic decay apply.

CELL ASSIGNMENT

Step 1 — register a CTFd callsign

The scoring platform is at ctfd.ctf.gcbsides.com. Make an account (any callsign that isn’t offensive). You can do this any time before the event — on the day, allow ~5 minutes if you haven’t.

Step 2 — pick a cell at registration

Cells are chosen on the day when you check in. Walk up to the desk, pick a cell with available headcount, and we’ll hand you the CTFd team join token. You don’t need to coordinate ahead of time.

The eight cells, all Gold Coast beach suburbs:

• BURLEIGH
• BROADBEACH
• COOLANGATTA
• NOBBY
• MERMAID
• PALM_BEACH
• MIAMI
• KIRRA

(Miami is real. Look it up.)

KIT MANIFEST

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

• Flag format: bin{snake_case_here}.
• In scope: the challenge containers and the CTFd scoring platform itself, solved as intended.
• Out of scope: other cells’ machines, the CTFd admin surface, event infrastructure (databases, jumpbox internals, ALB, ECS), the venue network and its other users, organisers’ personal devices, anything not explicitly part of a challenge.
• No denial-of-service or destructive actions against any in-scope target. If a challenge appears wedged for everyone, flag an organiser — we will manually credit the component if needed.
• Be cool: asking for hints in the event chat is fine; posting solutions or live flags is not.