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Cyber Defense Competition Has A New Champion
lisah writes "Several colleges across the country went head-to-head in San Antonio, Texas last weekend at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition to see which team could best protect their networks against attacks. In a modern day version of Steal the Flag, the teams duked it out using identical network setups that included a Cisco router and five servers. In the end, Baker College took the champion's title from last year's winner, Texas A & M University."
This is going to become more critical not just in terms of servers and informational or command based attacks, but also in terms of actual combat systems as we start to integrate more robots and remote networked combat platforms. For instance, my last visit to Creech AFB was very informative, but also illustrated a number of potential weaknesses in the system that controls remotely operated unmanned aerial vehicles actively engaging in combat.
Exercises such as these are critically important to war-game any networked system, particularly when that system is using commercial off the shelf solutions and commodity hardware that is accessible and easy to explore outside the realm of cyber warfare. i.e. war-gaming your attacks before going live...
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I always thought it was one step above a community college! Either I was wrong or they have improved a lot recently.
Any word on when ESPN will start broadcasting these "games" live? Throw in a few hot cheer leaders and I'd watch. Actually, anybody know where I can get tickets?
Welcome to Slashdot. Producing broken, spaghetti code and completely ignoring their user base since 1997.
I captured your net packets lol.
Next thing these kids will be employed by Comcast to capture customer 'flags'
Usually competitions like this are in "Which OS is most secure" kinds of settings, where the ostensible purpose is to find out which OS is the most secure. However, in this case, you had you had a bunch of different OSs all linked together, and you had to protect them from a bunch of security professionals. I imagine these "pros" probably weren't hard-core hackers, and given that, I'm not sure what the value of the exercise was. These pros won't have anything in their arsenal that everybody doesn't already know about it (at least, if they're studying computer security, they *ought* to know about it), and so we're basically left with (and this is something the article mentions) a bunch of people changing their conf files as fast as possible. If you ask me, they should six Eastern Europeans and North Koreans, and offer them $10,000 for every box they own. If the teams box doesn't get owned, they get the ten grand. Simpler, more interesting, and far more realistic.
I'm just happy to see that my school (RIT) made it to the finals. Didn't even know we had a team.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
In a previous life this is something I did with government networks on a daily basis .. as I'm sure most slashdotter's have done.
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Well this competition was actually a great one. I was one of the red team members for the nationals (and also the only person to have gone from a regional team captain to the national red team). The competition was very close to the very end with only a few subtle mistakes being made as of the second day. The run down is usually like this for the red team: Day 1: Boxes are extremly vulnerable and red team had a hayday with easily found exploits. We set some backdoors and have some fun with the servers. Looking for customer data that is stored on them. Day 2: Teams have patched most boxes and taken care of most of the vulns out there. Red team goes after websites finding exploits for the most part since boxes are locked down other than holes we inserted ourselves. Default passwords on ecommerce sites are usually one of the last things to change. Day 3: Boxes and teams are finally pretty locked down. Some last holes are left over from the red team. Nessus and Core Impact and other tools are worthless at this point at the latest (if not midday saturday). This day red team is pretty much just having fun, especially the team lead, Dave with his laughing that echos down the halls making the other teams nervous. In all every team did a great job. Everyone learned alot (heck I learned alot red teaming with some of these guys). Stupid mistakes were made by every team and we (the red team) loved the teams for it. Can't wait to come back next year and seeing what the teams will do then.
Clearly, the submitter is an FPS noob who doesn't know that it's "capture", not "steal", the flag! ;)
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
urgh....It's called CAPTURE THE FLAG!! oh come on....
Epic. Just epic.
So I guess all the federal agencies gathered up everyones names and put them into some national "hacker" database.
I led a team that competed in one of the qualifiers and found the competition extremely wanting. It's more of an arcane system administration challenge rather than anything about security. Some responses to the competition are collected at my lab's blog here: http://isisblogs.poly.edu/2008/02/29/pre-neccdc/ (see the comments)
...in less than three seconds.
All it takes is Mr. Diagonal Cutters meet Mr. CAT5 cable. Network is then instantly secured against outside hackerz.
This competition is about best defending a network in as short a time as possible. Each region creates its own scenario independent from the national level and it creates different levels of fun and realism for the teams. In essence this competition is realistic from a sys admin point of view and thats mainly the people who will be admining these system. Once again I say this as a red team point of view and that of someone who was team captain of the UTSA team this year (the hosts of the national competition every year).
I like the new comments. Among other things, it means that my subscriber page views go a lot farther.
I'd like to see the final setup... It's very interesting.
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!!!
Actually...I know for a fact that 0-days were part of the regionals for some of the teams. So, you might want to check your facts.
Regardless, the red team members should be applauded because they get nothing out of this event. It is volunteer based....
Of course you had fun! You were on the Red team and you got to abuse groups of college students for a weekend! At least for the region we were in, the competition is NOT about how to best defend a network in as short a time as possible. It was about blindly following arbitrary rules and being a system administrator.
To be fair, I was red team at nationals (albeit I was humlbed greatly by the rest of the red team), I was the team captain for UTSA at regionals this year. I've seen it from the blue team, white team and red team viewpoint. Blue is the most frustrating I do say but in the end I've always walked away having learned something.
No systems should be networked until they are properly configured. If somebody hands you a crap infrastructure full of holes, the first thing to do is shut down as much internetworking as you possibly can get away with.
*shrug*.
I like it.
Ok I call shotgun !
Who was caboose ?
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I attend baker college of Flint and tutored CIS systems and programming courses for several years. There is 1 good CIS instructor there who takes the initiative to encourage CIS students to take their education further outside of school. This is rare, the other instructors are flunkies. They are severely underpaid.
Baker college is not even a step 'above' a community college. It is referred to a "2nd chance" school, where anybody with a checkbook is accepted.
Let it be known, these students did not learn their skills from our school. This is Flint, MI. Surviving in this city alone is an education in itself. This is another example of how CIS can be successfully self-taught.
Try this next year gentlemen (those of you in this contest this year)...
That is, if you did not this year (or, applied points & tools like this URL suggests), for your Windows rigs (& even *NIX variants as well):
HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA, + make it "fun" to do, via CIS Tool guidance:
http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=c5687d1b44107836fa4d1dd9ba76f348&t=28430
CIS Tool? Hey - It works!
(& especially if you apply CIS Tool's points & those I layered ontop of them)...
Though the points in that URL are MOSTLY geard to "stand-alone" single home machines online (home users, no LAN etc. et al), it does note how its points CAN be applied to LAN/WAN environs as well to secure them, & with examples from companies (not just my own, either) using CIS Tool guidance & my points ontop of them to secure themselves.
APK
P.S.=> 2-3 hrs. of your time, in downloading, installing, + running CIS Tool... then, applying its suggestions/points (based on industry-wide best practices for security, such as those listed @ NIST for example & more), & then lastly applying points I make ontop of them, will gain you YEARS to DECADES into the distance of secure, safe, & faster internet performance & uptime... apk
I'm not sure why this was tagged as the National competition - there's a yearly competition just like this that's been happening for quite some time between the services academies.
The United States Military Academy, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, Naval Post Graduate all put together blue teams, and NSA generally serves as the red team; grabbing a group of folks from their grey-hat population.
Granted, this is only between the service academies, but the issue I take with this is when a few colleges do something, and call it a national competition. I mean...none of the big hitters are even involved.