SANS NetWars in March

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 11:11:00 +0000

This past month of March was quite eventful, to say the least, with all the news of this pandemic shaking many different segments of our globalised society. It’s virtually impossible to escape the constant flow of news in the media. While March was practically defined by the continuously evolving story of the virus, I wanted to write a new blog post about a different topic that also greatly impacted this month for me: a live SANS course I took attended in Prague and some online CTF challenges organised by SANS and the Counter Hack team.

SANS Prague March 2020

I still remember how excited I was when I learnt that my employer will sponsor my attendance a 6 days long SANS course in March, taking place in the city where I live and work currently. I was eagerly looking forward to it, taking place between 9th and 14th of March.

The course was arranged in a very nice hotel in Prague 5 district, and we were hosted by a very friendly SANS staff that included some world-class teachers. I really liked how well they organised everything and tried to spoil us with good food. There were actually several courses running in parallel, my course, the SEC530, a.k.a Defensible Security Architecture and Engineering, was taught by Ryan Nicholson, who did a great job during the first 3 days.

Sadly however, on Wednesday (11th of March) we were instructed to go home due to the growing risk of contacting the COVID-19 virus. All was not lost, because the SANS team did their best to convert the whole class to an online CyberCast while the course was in progress. So from the next day onward, we continued remotely with new instructors, who jumped in, while Ryan was on his way back to the States. Initially we thought he would continue hosting the CyberCast from his hotel room, but eventually we got to know two new SANS instructors, Greg Scheidel and Ismael Valenzuela, who took turns teaching the rest of the course material and then hosting the NetWars event for us.

SANS NetWars

While the raw educational content of Sec530 was great, I most enjoyed the last day of the course when we got to take part in a private NetWars challenge hosted just for the participants of the course, which was about 10-15 people. I had some initial ideas about what NetWars was all about, thanks to numerous cleverly placed banners in Holiday Hack Challenges from previous years, I never actually got to participate in one before so it was a completely new experience for me. And I was immediately loving it so much, that when it was over I knew I wanted more!

So you can imagine how excited I was when I learnt that SANS was going to offer a bunch of free NetWars events for SANS alumni, with some special events open to the whole world to take part in! First one was a two-day Core NetWars Tournament, first of its kind, organised completely online via CyberCast from 19th to 20th of March. Due to timezone differences, it lasted until 2 am on both days, but I loved every second of it! While I had no high hopes of winning, I was surprised how well I did, eventually finishing as 12th amongst the first time NetWars players.

Next up was the Mini NetWars Mission 1, also first of its kind, from 2nd till 3rd of April. This was a bit different from Core NetWars, as we did not have to solve the challenges in a virtualised OS environment, instead we relied solely on the browser, very similar to how the Holiday Hack environment works, which was already quite familiar to me!

This time many more people signed up, as registration was not limited to just SANS alumni but open to the public. Eventually we were more than 500 people competing! This time I managed to solve all of the objectives and obtained the maximum score of 92 which qualified me as a winner. My final placement on the ranking was somewhere around 50th, as I took a number of hints and was a bit slower than others. Nevertheless, I was still amazed by how far I have come. By the way, this is my battle station setup, which won me some cool SANS swag on Twitter :)

CONCLUSION

All in all, I cannot thanks SANS enough for hosting these alumni NetWars events, some completely free for the whole cyber security community. I am probably not alone in feeling that they did an amazing service to us all, who are probably stuck at home due to social distancing and quarantine measures implemented world wide. This month for me was surely made a bit special, so big thanks to SANS and the Counter Hack team for all that their efforts!

P.S.:: A very very very cool Spotify Playlist, which works wonders during such CTF contests, is available via this link. I cannot take credit for it, it belongs to Bryce Galbraith who moderated these two previous NetWars events and was kind enough to share his playlist with us.

counterhack | FLRNKS

SANS NetWars in March

SANS Prague March 2020

SANS NetWars

CONCLUSION