SOL 18 – ARES III Mission – Mars, year 2035.

A powerful dust storm is rapidly approaching your base – HAB – endangering life and the integrity of the mission's vital systems. The crew has decided to make an emergency evacuation and leave on the Hermes orbital spaceship.

But something happened…

A piece of antenna hits astronaut Mark Watney, and he loses contact with the others. He is considered lost – dead. But no. He survived.

You areMark Watney.

Now you are alone. On a cold, desolate planet. With damaged systems. No communication. No help. With no options… except to survive.

But you don't give up!

You will get the systems back up and running. You will use your skills as an engineer, a hacker, and a person who refuses to give up. Because you may be alone, but you are also the most dangerous person on this planet.

The CTF has just begun. And it's up to you to help Watney get home.

🎯 CTF Purpouse

Play the role of Mark Watney and through techincal challenges you will :

• Resotre basic systems to HAB.
• Repair the Rover dhe find the Pathfinder.
• Restore communication with NASA.
• Hack the spaceship and travel to Earth.

🧠 Skills needed for this CTF

• OSINT & investigation logic
• SCADA/ICS (Modbus, PLC, HMI)
• Forensics & Reverse Engineering
• Crypto & Encoding (base64, hex, xor)
• Networking & Packet Analysis
• Audio Analysis/Steganography
• File-sh manipulation (.rar/.png/.exe)
• UI interactivity (py + html + HMI)

🎓 What you will have learned

• To manage a technical narrative with related chain challenges
• To combine real ICS elements with CTF creativity
• To analyze audio, metadata and hidden .exe
• To automate file and log sharing/monitoring
• To think like a spaceship engineer...on Mars 😄

🛰 Now is your turn

Alone in Mars. There is no help and no communication. Only you, your mind… and a terminal in front of you.

Welcome into The Martian: Cyber Survival.

🛰 Your time ends 17.05.2025, 13:00

🎬 This scenario is based on an inspired by the movie The Martian (2015), set in and configured in a CTF World. Everything and each task is authentic and created with passion from Our Team. Hope that you will enjoy it.