The Student vs Hacker Security Showdown Rematch

monkeyboy44 writes "Following up on last year's entertaining hacker vs. student showdown, InformIT.com once again covered the annual Mid-Atlantic Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition where college students are put to the test. During the three day event, small teams from eight of the areas colleges are handed insecure networks that they have to lockdown and keep running — all while a team of hackers attempt to gain access any way they can. To keep it interesting, the teams also had to perform various tasks, such as program web applications, install IDS systems and more — and if hacked, the US Secret Service was on hand to determine if there was enough data to start an investigation. Once again, the hackers dominated — but not without a few surprises."

Comments

Movie

[bigmauler]

I smell a movie coming from this.

Perhaps Hackers 2: Mid-Atlantic Meltdown.

Let's hope Jolie is up to the task.

Re:Completely Rigged

[wiremind]

As the red team clearly illustrated, it only takes a few minutes to gain access to a Linux box via single user mode, bypass BIOS passwords by shorting out the motherboard

 

This also has nothing to do with a sysadmins job. If you put your servers physically in the hands of an attacker, there is nothing you can do to stop them quite by definition.

The sysadmin is responsible for securing the servers, even physically. Part of the backup plan at my office includes offsite backups in case of physical theft . But I would presume its pretty standard knowledge that your servers are locked up, with no physical access.

So either these players are just dumb, or they werent given the option of physical lockdown.

Kyle