Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 11, 2026

PACTF

PACTF was an annual web-based computer security Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for middle and high school students. It was founded by a group of students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The competition's sponsors include the Abbot Academy Association at Phillips Academy; the Information Networking Institute and CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; the Hariri Institute for Computing, Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project, and Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project at Boston University; and other entities.

Last revised
Jun 11, 2026
Read time
≈ 2 min
Length
410 w
Citations
16
Source
Wikipedia ↗
PACTF
Screenshot
PACTF Home Page 04-AUG-2016
Type of site
Competition
Available inEnglish
OwnerPhillips Academy Techmasters1
Created by
  • Yatharth Agarwal
  • Tony Tan
  • Cameron Wong2
URLwww.pactf.com
CommercialNo
RegistrationRequired
LaunchedNovember 12, 2015 (2015-11-12)3
Current statusArchived
Written inPython4
2016 PACTF Organizers source ↗

PACTF was an annual web-based computer security Capture the Flag (CTF) competition for middle and high school students.2 It was founded by a group of students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.5 The competition's sponsors include the Abbot Academy Association at Phillips Academy; the Information Networking Institute and CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; the Hariri Institute for Computing, Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) project, and Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS) project at Boston University; and other entities.67

This competition follows the Jeopardy CTF format,8 where teams “hack, decrypt, reverse, and do whatever it takes to solve increasingly challenging security puzzles."9 Once a team successfully determines the security vulnerability purposefully left in the problem material and executes an attack, they can obtain an answer string called a "flag." By submitting the correct flag, teams can receive feedback and points that improve their ranking.10

In April 2016, more than 1000 teams from the United States and other countries participated in the competition.2 The second and third PACTF competitions took place in the Spring of 2017 and 2018 at similar scales.111213 The fourth PACTF competition took place in May 2019.14

References

References

  1. "About PACTF". www.pactf.com. PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
  2. Tkacik, Daniel (2016-06-08). "Thanks to CyLab's picoCTF, the Phillips Academy celebrates its own successful hacking contest - Carnegie Mellon University CyLab". www.cylab.cmu.edu. Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  3. "Current Year Grants - Abbot Academy Association". www.andover.edu. Phillips Academy. Archived from the original on 2016-08-04. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
  4. "PACTF Source Code". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
  5. Ramos, JP; Tolo, Larson (2016-05-03). "P.A.C.T.F. Competition Hopes To Educate Students in Computer Security". The Phillipian. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  6. "INI and CyLab sponsor high school's first hacking contest". www.ini.cmu.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-08-04. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  7. "Sponsors". PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  8. "CTFtime ctf-wtf". www.ctftime.org/ctf-wtf.
  9. "PACTF". www.pactf.com. PACTF. Retrieved 2016-08-04.
  10. "Institute, MACS, and MOC Co-Sponsor Online Computer Security Competition » Rafik Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering | Blog Archive | Boston University". www.bu.edu. Boston University. 2016-06-23. Retrieved 2016-08-03.
  11. Chang, Tiffany; Cordova-Potter, Zar (2017-04-30). "PACTF Attracts Thousands of Hacking Afficionados [sic] Worldwide". The Phillipian. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  12. Hong, Alex (2018-05-26). "PACTF 2018 Writeup: AI". Medium. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  13. "Phillips Academy Capture the Flag (PACTF) Launches Third Annual Computer Science Competition" (PDF). The Phillipian. 2018-04-20. p. 6. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  14. PACTF. "PACTF". 2019.pactf.com. Retrieved 2019-04-15.