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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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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?
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.
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.