Re:Teams? (Score 1)

The penalty for off-line boxes was MORE severe than the reward for an 0wn. You could basically score two points for an 0wn per 5-10 minutes. If you managed to take down all your services for the whole game, you'd end up with 0 points, because your attack score was multiplied by your uptime percentage. Let's say that you determined that you were getting pwn3d through the Alice service about 1/2 way through the game, so you just shut the thing off. The one team would probably fail to score two points every 20 minutes, for a loss of about 90 points (before you take the other team's uptime/SLA into account... a good team had a 60% uptime, so this is at most 54 adjusted points). But, what would you be giving up? IIRC, in this scenario, you'd probably fail about 150 polls due to Alice being down. This would move your SLA/uptime down at least 5%. The top teams were all scoring about 1000 points or more before SLA scaling. This would make it a wash versus the team that 0wned Alice, but you are losing points with respect to other teams, too. If you just leave Alice up, only one team gains ~50 points on you. If the team 0wning you makes it so that you don't score uptime points, then they deserve to have the service taken down on them... if they were good, they scored "breakthrough" points anyway. On the whole, though, you should have been trying to figure out HOW you were being owned, and use that to fix the service. It was part of the game. We gave "breakthrough" points for finding a problem at all, so if you were good at auditing, you would score (first people to report a breakthrough got a lot of points, but subsequent reporters got very few). Just to give you an example, the winning team wouldn't have won if they hadn't found a new vulnerability in the last hour of the game.