Google has announced its capture the flag for 2017.  Offering rewards for the winners and also participation if you are creative with your write up for the challenges you complete, so this should give many more individuals a chance of getting something for their effort, other than the enjoyment of course.

Qualification starts on the 17th of June, whereas if you can score enough points you can be invited to the final which will be held at google where you are then competing in another exercise in order to be declared the winner.

 

Why do we host these competitions?

There are three main reasons why we host these competitions.

First, as we’ve seen with our Vulnerability Reward Program, the security community’s efforts help us better protect Google users, and the web as a whole. We’d like to give the people who solve a single challenge or two in a very clever way a chance to teach us and the security community, even if they don’t qualify for the finals. We also think that these challenges allows us to share with the world the types of problems our security team works on every day.

https://security.googleblog.com/2017/06/announcing-google-capture-flag-2017.html

I do like these type of events as you get to see how creative people can be with problem solving, and usually many things we can learn from others as a result.