Slashdot Mirror
Computer Attack and Defense As Spectator Sport
zanbar writes "There was a Slashdot story in March about the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin -- using WiFi in a theater. On Jan 11th, an event at the Alamo will combine video with wireless.
LinuxTopGun.org gives details about a series of computer network attack competitions going on tour through North America.
They bring in a Linux/Apache web server, a bunch of teams bring in their laptops and attack it over a wireless network. Teams take turns onstage defending the server and then answering audience Q&A about their strategies. MCs interview competitors and explain network attacks to the audience. DJs mix and VJs flip live video with network visualization software -- animations like in the movie 'Hackers.' Judges award points for how well competitors perform, both online and onstage, and the top teams win prizes... It's like watching computer attacks as a live sport. There is also some discussion taking place in #ltg on efnet."
Geek Olympics!
Magic 8 ball points to very doubtful.
ostiguy
People watch movies like swordfish and think people can break into a network in under a minuite while getting their knob schlobbed. The truth is hacking is a lot slower in real life. I would rather watch the pong channel.
I'm not a crook or a terrorist for God's sake. I'm in *training.* Coke is talking contract and they're considering me for a color commentator position with "Monday Night Crack."
Oh stop crying Ma. That does *not* mean I'm a junkie.
Jesus I've gotta move out of the basement and find my own place.
KFG
if they have trouble with video game tournaments getting mega-popular, i cant imagine how hard it will be to promote the local ghost white chubby kid typing away at a command prompt.
"wow, he typed a string of commands... the crowd hushes"
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Why not put phone booths up where the guys who are doing the hacking will go, and kit them out with bizarre headsets (with no apparent function) and laptops that have been doused in spray paint.
:)
Hack the planet!
And yes, I am kidding
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
It's like watching computer attacks as a live sport.
As the geeks slowly take over the earth, and the collective physical fitness of the human race goes down.. we'll be seeing this at the Olympics one day.
Awesome.
As Garth said, "That's a UNIX book!"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Isn't this like watching paint dry compared to... UNREAL touraments?
Why would I watch hackers hack, when I can see graphics of blood and gore in a game of tag that even an ape can enjoy and understand?
I mean, I'm a geek, but this just seems a little too bizzare for all but the uber-geeks of the world.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I want to see a DDoS illustration using people and ping pong balls. Now that's edutainment!
and VJs flip live video with network visualization software -- animations like in the movie 'Hackers.'
The movie 'Hackers' had nothing to do with computers or reality for that matter. Please don't feed the trolls.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I wonder what network visualization tools they're using? It'd be interesting to see what visualization tools are compelling enough to use in a spectator sport.
I checked the site, but there was only a link to one.
Does anyone else know of any dynamic, visually-interesting (and preferably free) visualization tools? Something like this might be a big hit if done at conferences and the like. I'd like to introduce them to a few I attend.
.@.
This is the kind of thing you only watch hoping someone gets hurt. Whether it be the server or a sudden case or carpal tunnel.
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
Junkyard wars is 12 hours long (10building+1tweeking+1competing), but when slimmed down to an hour TV show it is one of the best things on tv.
Why?
Because they talk with the teams, and explain the engineering behind the plans. I think that by having teams rather than individuals compete, with a team radio or something that the audience could listen to it would be worth attending/watching.
How long does my younger brother have to wait for the cartoon?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Laptops used attack over a wireless network? Teams take turns onstage defending the server?
Bah, Feh!
Whatever happened to the good-old-days of experimental theatre when the audience was encouraged to take off _their_ clothes and join the fun onstage?!
--- have you healed your church website?
Naysayer's to the contrary, it's actually an interesting event.
I attended part of the last LTG at Mojo's Daily Grind. There were many, many people there participating and watching, and you have a lot of opportunity to meet new people. The actual "hacking" was slow, but there was music and a projector screen showing what was going on, if you could follow it. One of the better features was that after their attempts each team would have a Q and A session with the audience. I'm looking forward to attending the next one at the Alamo...
but in "Hackers" Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie) is a hot, female, hacker...what's that? huh, your saying that's not reality...damn, becuase everything else in the movie is *so realistic*...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Hey,
My main question would be: How are they going to make this interesting?
I mean, computer security usually means good network structure, strong passwords, turning off services that aren't required, and keeping up to date with patches. And they almost certainly won't allow rewiring (i.e. firewall installation).
And the red team institutes a password requiring passwords to be 18 charachters long, and not found in any dictionary! The crowd goes wild!
Oh, and the blue team schedules an automatic twice daily apt-get of all updates! Surely the red team are done for?!
But no, the Red team have found a finger daemon they missed, and deactivated it! This is turning into a very close contest!...
Of course, the website talks about support by models from Hot-Tool Fashion Crew. So it could be good.
But it'll be hard.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
here's another similar one that i used to play around with...Robocode...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
-Well Norman, looks like team 1337 is going for the Port 24567 vulnerability.
-Yes Edmond, but I think that h4x0r's defenders probably have that patch on disk.
-(9 hours later)Oh, 1337's coders were just using that as a distraction while they sniffed other open ports.
-Well Ed, looks like team 1337 has really got a 'handle' on the buffer overflow.
-Thanks, Norm, looks like this could be the end for h4x0r. We'll be back with highlights after the break.
hazardfactory.org
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
Now, the fun games to watch are the really pretty space combat sims like freespace 2 for example, which is old enough to now play at high resolutions on mediocre machines. I have a tbird 1.4 gig with a gf3ti200, which is way more machine than you need to play THAT... And it looks especially pretty at 1024x768x32bpp which was only barely playable on my old config (GF2MX400, Athlonclassic 700.) They're pretty, they're accessible thanks to years of prime-time sci-fi programming (TELEVISION programming) and they're epic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm thinking back a few years... actually, quite a few. There was a game called "CoreWars". Bell labs , I think.
It was one of the first, if not the first, kind of game where software was programmed to attack each other and basically be "kind of the hill".
Anyways, I'm thinking that the only real way to make a "hack" session interesting is to have a visual aspect, which is what corewars had. You both wrote your code. Put it into the system's core memory, then let them rip. You'd actually be able to see the memory map being consumed by the programs.
Too bad the same can't be said of people breaking into systems, that is... unless you have a massive network of say... 5000 systems and they have a "flag" system so as they are taken over and used, their "allegiance" color changes.
But do these people actually have any idea how long that takes or how numbingly boring it is?
It would be interesting to see what they come up with, but I think maintaining systems and fending off network abusers is "interesting" enough without turning it into a sport.
Especially true people make some associations between your particular "style" and some criminal files which are still open on a detective's desk. Yes, that can become quite interesting in a spectator kind of way real fast.
Winged Power Photography
All their visualization software did was crash my PC. Neat.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
As a member of a newly cobbled together group of 'entry level' security analysts I am looking at this as an example of something we may put together for our lab in order for us to gain more experience in this area. We have a number of OSes and a few lab computers as well as some of our own personal 'lab' computers to work from. [Many years' IT experience this is our first security job so we start by yep, you guessed it, watching IDS sensors but it is good learning].
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Took the liberty to setup a mirror for topgunlinux, as it has been /.'ed and the downloads of the videos are slow, you can find the mirror here..
:)
Have fun
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
I don't imagine that there will be too many available connections left to watch on after the NSA and FBI bogarts most of them to monitor things for themselves. I don't see them missing out on the opportunity to watch a crapload of different approaches to cracking all at the same time from the crackers' perspectives. That'd be like them not bothering to watch an international bank robbing competition.
Shawn
Because you gotta bitch
Since they're attacking it over a WiFi link, can't the server team jam the WiFi band? What about non-geek methods, aka Human Engineering hack attempts?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Now this might be a sport worth watching if they were hacking the server while being chased by FEDS with clubs and tasers, that would add some sport element to it.
I guess we have all outgrown the days of C-Robots and CoreWars... *sigh* I know, I know, it was just real cheesy pseudo-animation, but for its day it was pretty cool.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
It's a proven fact that more people hack Windows :)
than Linux. I think they'd open the competition up
to more people if they use the number one operating
system for the target. There is an enormous pool of
MCSE's nationwide they could draw upon to defend the
windows server. I personally think that would be a
lot more fun to watch. *cough* *cough*
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
While this idea sounds like it might be rather slow paced, I think this would be a great idea for an advanced network security class. The class is divided up into teams that is responsible for admin'ing a server. They have to keep it up while attacking the other team's machines. You get to learn about system admin as well as actual hacking techniques and defenses. I wish my school had a class like this...
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today's secret ingredient is...a Tux webserver!!!
Fuki San! (yes, go ahead!) The challenger is now going into the KDE menu and invoking nmapfe!
(one of the guest judges:) Hahaha, he'll soon find out that the people running the server took notes from a different competition and firewalled everything but port 80 on the server.
Fuki San! (yes!) The Iron h4x0r Linux commented on the challenger's methods by saying true l337 people run nmap from the command line. The Iron h4x0r has also already discovered that only port 80 is open and is now launching a brute-force attack on any default CGI scripts the secret server may have installed.
Ah yes. They could call it the I 0w|\| j00 Stadium and have Iron Cracker for Linux, BSD, Solaris, and I guess Iron Cracker Windows would be like "Iron Chef TV Dinner" or something.
"...animations like in the movie 'Hackers."
Hmmm.. There's a sure way to de-value your sport.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Would you really want a bunch of pasty white geeks getting their kit off on stage, and "joining in" on the action?
It would certainly violate most cities decency laws, as well as pushing the bounds of bad taste in ways only John Waters could almost tolerate.
the AC
I'm going to relapse into a quivering useless mass until I purge those thoughts from my poor brain
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
If you could tie things like Telnet and different port acess points to map locations and then have to fight to gain control of those areas and then have people doing the actual hacking while your team is fighting for control... I think this could have possibilities.
Imagine having areas where you could gain access to a root terminal, password files etc... Combine the high adreneline of FPS game with the slower meta game of hacking the other guys system. Make the ultimate goal cutting off the other teams access to the game server or something like that.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
If I said Windows.NET Technology instead of winshit, would it still have been trolling?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
COMMENTATOR 2: Oh my God! He pulled out a Mountain Dew! Folks, jaws are dropping.
COMMENTATOR 1: But don't count out Jimmy yet from the Canadian team... he's
COMMENTATOR 2: Sacrificing features for stability. That's a rare move in this sport...
In Austin. They had it at Mojo's Daily Grind, a local coffee house. It sucked, frankly. There were about 20 people there and it was pretty lame. I left like right after I got there. Frankly I'm surprised this is getting slashdot coverage. If the next one is better, maybe.. but if it's anything like the last one you'd be wasting your time going.