Because in the real world, you might have a vulnerability that lets you run one of those packages as root. The competition is to show how many of those you coul

Because in the real world, you might have a vulnerability that lets you run one of those packages as root. The competition is to show how many of those you could exploit. Of course some of them are trivial, you don't get any props for showing arbitrary file reading when you can run bash or perl as root. But exploiting readline that way is pretty interesting!