How የቆሎ ተማሪ | Yekolo Temari Simplified CTF Hosting with Simulations Labs
About የቆሎ ተማሪ | Yekolo Temari
የቆሎ ተማሪ | Yekolo Temari is a community based in Ethiopia, dedicated to raising awareness and building technical skills to uplift the country’s growing cybersecurity talent. They run various educational and technical initiatives, and Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are one of their core activities for engaging and upskilling young talents.
Challenges
Before using Simulations Labs, Yekolo Temari faced several difficulties:
- Server management headaches: Hosting CTFs on their own servers required constant monitoring to ensure uptime and to prevent crashes or attacks.
- Security concerns: Managing security to avoid server attacks consumed significant effort.
- Player conflicts: On demand labs ran on shared environments, meaning players could affect one another’s progress if they were on the same instance.
These challenges created additional workload for organizers, distracting them from their real focus—building and delivering meaningful challenges for participants.
Solution
Yekolo Temari partnered with Simulations Labs to host their CTF competitions. The platform provided:
- Reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure: No more worrying about server downtime or external attacks.
- Independent player instances: Each participant gets their own isolated environment, eliminating conflicts between players.
- Container hosting and management: Simulations Labs takes care of running containers, managing images, and maintaining infrastructure, freeing the organizers to focus purely on content.
Outcome
With Simulations Labs, Yekolo Temari successfully hosted a 1-day CTF with 50+ participants.
The event ran smoothly without technical interruptions, providing a seamless experience for both organizers and players.
Customer Quote
“Simulations Labs has made it very easy to host a CTF. We only focus on creating and uploading the challenges, and everything else gets taken care of. On the CTF day, we didn’t need to worry about the site going down or getting attacked.”
— Henock Negash, Community Lead, Yekolo Temari
