[Cr3aTor]

Yes, to get Australian IT noobies like me and grey/black hat hackers from collages and universities into whitehat pen-testing and infosec for large corporations, our Government have created a challenge over a 24 hour duration to pretty much compete other teams of 4 students. I believe there are more than 150 teams this year. It starts in a few weeks but in the mean time,

It's pretty awesome that the Government create such activities.

our team have been studying and practicing hard during our break, mainly due to knowing what things are, but not knowing how to do it, e.g buffer-over flow, XSS etc. A lot of our personal time have been put into this, but it's a great experience and it's a field I want to grow into.

Good to hear that more and more people want to learn the "black magic" of how computers work and how to exploit them. I would suggest that each one of you to specialize in something (RE, Web Security, Forensics, Exploit Dev, etc) and then group all the skills together. This would be just a temporary solution to participate at the challenge because, afterwards you could look more in depth for each one of these.
CTFs are definitely a good way to expand your knowledge and to have fun at the same time. I made a thread with a few CTF sites that maybe would help.
Good luck and I hope you will have an interesting journey!