I would like to congratulate Ed Skoudis and the SANS staff to make Kringlecon version 3 (2020) available for free for anyone, BIG kudos to you! The learning experience people can get out of this type of event is huge. Keep up the good work!

This was my first time playing the challenge, in general, the challenge is very well put together, the different objectives are interesting ranging from the easy solves that take just a couple of minutes to those that will make you read and dive deep into the documentation to solve them. My detailed KringleCon 2020 is here.

Some of the challenges are played in over websockets terminal and some others have their dedicated web page, the general navigation of kringlecon is by moving your avatar around and clicking on the different icons to access the terminals or web pages. In my personal experience, I would prefer a list of challenges to avoid the slugish animation that often drives the browser memory hungry.

I played the game over the course of early mornings and late nights of the first couple weeks of the challenge as that was what Family and work allowed me. A couple of times the site went down or was unresponsive but the SANS staff get it back online soon after reporting it in their discord channel.

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There are some ELF characters near the different terminals that will give you hints when you speak at them, I realized late that often it can save you a lot of time to look at what they say, and in some cases, you need to get the hints as they may contain important information to solve the challenge.

In the last objective, it was not very clear to me what the goal was so it took me a while to figure it out as the redaction is not clear and you can take different approaches to solve it. Anyway, speaking with others in the discord channel gave me a couple hints of what it was expected and from there solving the objective was quite straight forward.

The narrative on the menu starts to unroll as you progress and solve the different objectives. Once all the objectives are completed the full narrative is displayed, the counter was a bit buggy so it may showing numbers far bigger than 7 but logging off will fix it.

Once all objectives are solved, you can go back to Santa’s office and get to the balcony where Santa will be waiting for you to roll the final credits and have access to the swag page to order some cool KringleCon hoodies and t-shirts.