Sarah Miller (scba)
November 18, 2025
As most people know, the November 2025 event was our first OSINT Search Party CTF under an all-new leadership team. To say we were nervous is a bit of an understatement! Thanks to our great Tech Team, the platform worked without a hitch (see the post below from them).
The Community team handles the human side of the CTF, from setting up the ticket system, to providing briefings, to recruiting coaches, to managing our Discord. We limited this CTF to 200 tickets to make sure both the internal teams and the technology could handle everything. Those 200 tickets translated to 73 active teams in the CTF, who submitted 3617 individual pieces of OSINT. Of those, 2947 were accepted.
In a very interesting twist, this quickly became one of the highest scoring CTFs we’ve ever held. There were a large number of “high value” flags, which led to 9 teams earning more than 10,000 points and 3 of those earning more than 20,000 points! Those high value flags get their values because they have the potential to provide especially pertinent information to law enforcement. We’re quite hopeful that this data will be put to use by law enforcement as soon as it is received.
We did hit some minor glitches with Discord, but they didn’t create a huge impact for participants, coaches, or staff. We sent more than 2200 messages across the server and ended up getting rate limited. Oops! We also maxed out our support ticket system, which made it harder for coaches to connect with their teams until we sorted out a workaround.
Speaking of coaches, since we were already dealing with so much “new” we only recruited from our experienced coaches to staff this event. We recruited well in advance of the event and ended up with 27 coaches. 15 of those coaches were already classified as Senior Coaches, having coached 5 or more times previously. At the end of the event, 2 more coaches were recognized as Senior Coaches, 2 were recognized at our new Master Coach level (10 or more CTFs), and 1 at our new Legacy Coach status, for having coached 20 or more CTFs. The average number of flags reviewed by each coach was 150 and nearly every coach was responsible for more than one team.
Our CTFs cannot happen without coaches. They review every flag that is submitted, accepting the ones that meet the specified criteria for the category, and rejecting those that do not. Rejections come with feedback, encouraging participants to resubmit with additional context if that’s likely to make the flag acceptable. Coaches are also watching for submissions that violate our rules, escalating those to admin for possible team disqualification. For this CTF, we also assigned 3 of our most senior coaches to do quality control. They reviewed high value flags to make sure those were accepted/rejected appropriately and at the end of the CTF, they, along with some admin staff, reviewed all of the submissions for the top 5 teams to ensure all of those points were correct.
In addition to all of those people, we had 16 volunteer staff members behind the scenes during the event making it all happen. From fixing tech hiccups, to creating real-time graphics, to social media management, to technical support, to discord roles, and to everything else that has to happen, this team made it as seamless as possible for our participants. Even more volunteer staff worked before the event on various pieces and the Reporting Team continues to work even now on finalizing reports. Our Training Team took notes before, during, and after the event on ways to improve our training to make everything better for the next time.
We also had exceptionally generous sponsors for this CTF, who donated prizes totaling more than $100,000 USD in value (we double checked the math on that!). While the focus of our CTF is always on finding information on missing people and conveying that to law enforcement, the support of our sponsors helps spread the word about the work we do and creates an extra incentive for teams to make their very best effort! It also serves to connect the broader OSINT4Good community and helps form relationships that can solve all sorts of problems!
In the end there were 4 winning teams:
The Most Valuable OSINT award isn’t necessarily for finding the highest point value flag (though it can be). The MVO winner has to provide one or more submissions that meet at least one of these criteria:
In this CTF, the MVO winning team submitted a flag that used geolocation techniques and was exceptionally well documented. They shared the basics of their submission in our Discord where anyone can read it. The members of that team get to participate in our CTFs for free forever.
A complete list of prize packages is listed in Discord and on our social media, but we would like to thank Lenso,ai, SockPuppet, OSMOSIS Association, Kase Scenarios, Noimosiny, Social Links, KASM, Epios, Crowdthreat, Exegol, Hunchly, and Maltego for their support.
Finally, our biggest thanks to all of our participants! Without you, none of this happens. We hope to see you all again at our next CTF, tentatively planned for the first quarter of 2026.
