The Rules

Playbook

How the hill is taken, and what ends a run.

King of the Hill

One machine. Every squad at once. No instances, no private copies — whoever’s token is in /data/king.txt wears the crown.

  1. Get in

    The hill serves HTTP and SSH. Find the way through the front door — everyone is knocking on the same one.

  2. Take the ground

    Escalate until you can write to the crown file. Read access proves nothing; the file is the only thing that counts.

  3. Write your token

    Put your squad's token in king.txt, exactly as issued. One line, nothing else, no trailing junk.

  4. Hold it

    You score for as long as the file still names you. The moment someone overwrites it, their clock starts and yours stops.

$ echo <your-squad-token> > /data/king.txt
$ cat /data/king.txt
  crown held — scoring every tick

Your token is issued to your squad and shown on The Hill. It never changes — treat it like a password.

Fair game

  • Patch the hole you came through — locking the door behind you is the game
  • Kill other squads' shells, cron jobs and backdoors
  • Establish your own persistence
  • Re-take the hill as often as you can hold it
  • Read anything on the box you can reach

Banned

  • Destroying the hill — wiping the system, filling the disk, killing SSH or the web service
  • Making king.txt unwritable or undeletable, or removing the file outright
  • Changing root or shared credentials so nobody else can get in
  • Denial of service against the hill, the scoreboard or another squad
  • Attacking the scoring platform, its host or anything outside the hill
  • Sharing or using another squad's token
  • Brute-forcing platform accounts

Breaking the hill for everyone is the one thing that ends a run. Scores are reviewed, and the box gets restored — not your points.