I'm usually not one to stroke my ego, but I am pretty damned proud of this no matter how nerdy it is.
This weekend I went with a team from my school for the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (
http://nationalccdc.org/). Our team got 1st place, and we get to go to the national competition in San Antonio. Last year the team got 2nd place in the nationals, but I wasn't on the team then. Hopefully we will pull 1st this year.
The premise of the competition is that we are taking over the IT department of a company. We had a Windows 2003 server, a Fedora Core 4 Linux server, a Windows XP workstation, and a Fedora Core 4 machine acting as our firewall (we wanted the Cisco Pix option but there was a miscommunication). Our job was to defend against the Red Team, which was a volunteer group of professional IT guys who remained anonymous over the weekend. In addition to this, we had to take email business injects from the White Team who acted as our boss. These tasks ranged from adding some things to our website, to setting up different and new software, and so on. We needed to keep DNS, apache, mysql, php, Microsoft Exchange, and some other services active at all times. If the score bot caught us with a service down, then we got penalized.
There was some really cool stuff that went on throughout the weekend. At one point during the second day, Slayer started playing on the one team's computer, and later someone jumped away from their computer proclaiming "Holy shit, someone is playing solitaire on our computer!" Our firewall got hacked sometime before Saturday morning, but we were the only team that didn't muck ours up on Friday night. They had to reset the firewalls and take away team controlled access to them for everyone but us.
There were two secret service agents there as well, and we had to fill out official government response forms when things happened. Luckily we got logs and IPs from our firewall hack. They scared us a bit when they revealed that, despite the fact that we were all crawling under the tables to plug USB drives into the backs of the servers, no team realized that there was a rogue wireless access point attached somewhere under each table. Nothing really happened with that, but it was a shock. The Red Team revealed today that they had a 64GB rainbow table which allowed them to quickly gain every password. Insane.
That's all I have time to explain, but I'm sure there is limited interest in this kind of stuff anyways laugh.gif
We won though, and I'm going to San Antonio.