All you need to know to create and manage your CTF team

While the saying- Together Everyone Achieves More — is true about any team; it is important to carefully select that “Everyone” on your CTF team. And this selection process becomes even more specific when you are planning to host CTFs, apart from just participating in them.

In this article, I will be discussing about how to choose a team (of course, if you are starting a new one) or what variety of expertise (and characteristics) the members of any CTF team should possess, so that your team is efficient enough not only to participate in CTFs, but also to host them.

It is recommended to have around 5 to 10 members. Some CTFs do have a participating team member limit and also having more than 10 members makes the team “too big” (in my opinion). Less than 5 members make the team too small to be able to work faster and solve more challenges simultaneously and also not enough members to handle all the work required to host a CTF.

You need a “Well-rounded” Team

In case you are a starter and not part of any team, you may choose to join an existing team or form your own. One common place where you can find like-minded people is through the discord servers of the CTFs you participate in.

Here are a few things that you might consider while looking for team members:

A good ingredient mix

Since CTFs have challenges in different categories; you would need members who are knowledgeable in solving as well as developing challenges in all these categories. Look out for team members who have different expertise. This will ensure that you get the right mix of people in your team. There should be those who could solve/create cryptography challenges or those who prefer binary exploitation; and also a few of those who know blockchain!

Some companies that sponsor CTF prizes are blockchain auditing firms and require that the CTF must have some blockchain challenges, so it is helpful to have someone on your team who knows blockchain. During my first year working with n00bzUnit3d on n00bzCTF, no one in the team knew cryptography well. I had made a few easy challenges, but we had to ask someone, outside our team, with the required expertise to provide us with some hard cryptography challenges. In conclusion, ensuring diversity in expertise allows for a team to succeed in both competing and hosting CTFs.

A globally-dispersed team — active 24/7

In your team, you must have members from all around the globe. This is crucial, during the time of hosting a CTF, because the team will be responsible for handling support related activities as well. The support team plays a crucial role and at least one admin should be available throughout the CTF in order to handle and answer user queries. During scriptCTF — 2025, we had people from different continents: North America, Asia, and Europe. While someone in the US was sleeping, someone in Asia was available to provide support, and vice-versa. First year of n00bzCTF did not go really well, but the responsiveness of the support team made up for it and helped the CTF and the team (n00bzUnit3d) to get a much higher rating.

An active team that strives for learning

It is important to have active members in your team, and members who are willing to learn and grow. CTFs are all about practice. To be better at solving CTFs (and making well-crafted challenges for your own CTF), one must be willing to put time into learning.

CTFTime is one of the best sources to search for past and upcoming CTFs. While the information about upcoming CTFs is important and helps you to plan your team participation ahead, details about past CTFs provide you with access to a great repository of learning resources.

Start with selecting easy CTF, choose a category that you like, or choose the one that you think is easier or looks more familiar. Filter out challenges in that category and search the Internet for the solve scripts of the challenges. Go through the script, understand the solution and practice doing the same yourself. Alternatively, you may choose to work the other way round: first trying to solve it yourself and then going through the solve scripts.

Learning becomes even more fun and goal-oriented when done with the team. For example, our team meets every Sunday evening and practices challenges. While it’s fun, it is also a more disciplined way of setting aside time for learning.

The ability to create the Backbone

Have members who are familiar with hosting infrastructure using platforms like Google Cloud Platform or Digital Ocean to host websites and virtual machines. Creating an infrastructure for hosting challenges is a crucial requirement for hosting a CTF and requires additional expertise. I will be sharing more technical details about this concept in my articles to come.

The Visibility

CTFTime is one of the most important resources for a CTF team as well as for each player. Apart from providing information about upcoming CTFs, it also ranks all teams by using a “weight” system (points assigned to each CTF and team based on quality and feedback). A specific number of points are then given to each participant, with 1st place getting the most and last place getting the least. This allows for a global ranking of all teams. Points are also given to the teams who organize their own CTFs!

In order to provide visibility and gain recognition, you must register your team with CTFTime. Here are the steps to do so:

Step 1: Make sure to sign in (or register) in the top right corner. Once signed in, head to profile -> create team option and create your own team! See Figure 1.

Step 2: Once you have created your team, it should show under your username in the top right (Figure 2). Clicking on it will take you to your team page. Click manage team. Now you can edit your team profile/info, add socials, website etc. and most importantly, you will see a code that you can share with your teammates so that they can join the newly created team!

Now you have your team registered on CTFTime!

Visit CTFTime regularly to have up-to-date information on upcoming CTFs and plan accordingly.

Note: You cannot take part in a CTF via CTFTime; it just gives you the information (date, prizes etc.) and the website link where the actual challenges/scoreboard will be.

Get familiar with your team by participating in CTFs and keeping track of your CTFTime rank. The better the rank, the higher chances of sponsorship from certain companies for your own CTF.

Good luck and happy hacking!

If you are reading my article for the first time, just to let you know that this article is a part of the series of the articles that I have been publishing, which aim at providing all the information needed to host your own CTF.

Here is the link to the first article:

How To Host Your Own CTF