Episode
23 July 2019 Official episode · Official transcript
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The episode covers Defcon badge puzzles and the history of Carnegie Mellon’s Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), including its CTF competitions, reverse-engineering work, Defcon CTF participation, and four Defcon CTF wins.
Topics: Capture the Flag competitions, Defcon attack/defense CTFs, reverse-engineering software from assembly and machine code, exploit development, custom challenge vulnerabilities, backdoors and persistence, crontab-based scheduled execution, network traffic analysis and packet sniffing, flag extraction and exfiltration, cryptography and cipher solving, ARM and MIPS architectures, disassemblers including IDA Pro, CTF team competition strategy
Links published on the Darknet Diaries episode page. Not LLM output.
No Sources heading on this episode page.
Qualified statements from this episode, not graph facts.
School of Computer Science PART_OF Carnegie Mellon
Jack says the School of Computer Science is one of the schools at Carnegie Mellon.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“Carnegie Mellon is a university in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and one of the schools they have there is the School of Computer Science.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning PART_OF Carnegie Mellon
PPP is described as a student-run team at Carnegie Mellon.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“This student-ran team at Carnegie Mellon was picking up some new students interested in hacking to help.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning DEVELOPED_BY Brian Pak
Tyler identifies Brian Pak as the founder of PPP.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“Brian Pak, [00:25:00] who is the founder of PPP”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning DEVELOPED_BY David Brumley
David Brumley proposed forming the Carnegie Mellon CTF team that became PPP.
Derived Confidence 88% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“David looked around for some online CTF teams for this student to join but came up with a different idea.”
“Maybe we should just form a team ourselves and see how that goes.”
Tyler MEMBER_OF Plaid Parliament of Pwning
Tyler says he joined the CTF group and later describes himself as the captain of PPP.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“Then myself and one other person joined up.”
“Tyler, now the captain of PPP”
Brian Pak MEMBER_OF Plaid Parliament of Pwning
Brian Pak is identified as the team's captain and founder.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“At that time, the captain was a guy called Brian Pak”
Andrew MEMBER_OF Plaid Parliament of Pwning
Andrew is described as one of the first people on the team.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“my friend, Andrew, who is one of the first people on the team”
Ricky Zhou MEMBER_OF Plaid Parliament of Pwning
Ricky Zhou is described as another person on the PPP team.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“One of the other people on our team, Ricky Zhou”
George Hotz MEMBER_OF Plaid Parliament of Pwning
George Hotz joined PPP to play CTFs with the team.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“George joined.”
“we quickly were like okay, you need to play CTFs with us”
Guy MEMBER_OF Legitimate Business Syndicate
Guy identifies himself as being from Legitimate Business Syndicate.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Guy EP 43 Details
“I’m Guy from Legitimate Business Syndicate.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning ASSOCIATED_WITH Seesaw
PPP competed in the Seesaw CTF and won its first major competition.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“The first big CTF that was coming up they all wanted to compete in was called Seesaw.”
“they announced first and it was our team”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning ASSOCIATED_WITH Codegate
PPP qualified for Codegate and finished in the top three in one attempt, later winning it.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“We managed to qualify for the competition”
“We managed to get first place which was I think, $20,000 prize money.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning ASSOCIATED_WITH ICTF
Tyler says PPP also played in ICTF.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“there was ICTF which is run by the University of California Santa Barbara”
“We played in that”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning ASSOCIATED_WITH Defcon CTF
PPP repeatedly competed in the Defcon CTF and ultimately won it four times.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“The team at PPP decided to give it a try.”
“At this point PPP has won the Defcon CTF four times.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES Capture the Flag
PPP's core activity is participating in Capture the Flag competitions.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“The CTF team at Carnegie Mellon was formed.”
“CTF stands [00:20:00] for Capture the Flag.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES exploit development
PPP members wrote their own exploits while training for CTFs.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“They were writing their own exploits”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES Reverse engineering
PPP trained in and used reverse engineering to find vulnerabilities in challenge software.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“learning how to reverse-engineer software like pros”
“This is what’s called reverse-engineering”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES IDA Pro
The team uses a disassembler such as IDA Pro for reverse engineering challenge software.
Derived Confidence 94% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“you use a disassembler like IDA Pro to do that”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES packet sniffing
PPP monitored and analyzed network traffic during Attack/Defense CTFs.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“you have to look at network traffic of things that other teams are sending over the network to your machine”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES Backdoor
PPP encountered and analyzed backdoors placed in competing teams' systems during the Defcon CTF.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“One of the things we saw was some clear version of a backdoor.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning USES crontab
PPP analyzed a malicious crontab entry used to maintain persistence in a CTF system.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“it was installing a crontab entry.”
“it turns out they did add a crontab entry”
George Hotz USES Reverse engineering
George Hotz is described as having reverse-engineered the PlayStation 3.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“George reverse-engineered the PlayStation 3”
picoCTF DEVELOPED_BY Plaid Parliament of Pwning
Jack says PPP created picoCTF as an educational CTF.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“Another really cool thing that PPP did was they made their own CTF. It’s called picoCTF”
picoCTF ASSOCIATED_WITH Carnegie Mellon
picoCTF is described as being backed by Carnegie Mellon and played by many schools.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Jack Rhysider EP 43 Details
“Since it’s backed by Carnegie Mellon, it’s played by many schools around the world.”
Plaid Parliament of Pwning ASSOCIATED_WITH DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge
Tyler says he and other PPP members participated in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge and won it with a company.
Explicit Confidence 96% · Tyler EP 43 Details
“me and a couple of other people from our team were participants in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge”
“we won first place in that”
Works mentioned in the transcript. Distinct from show-note sources.
Model gpt-5.6-luna · prompt 1.5.19 · schema 1.5.19 · 2026-09-13T05:58:41.666268+00:00