by Ariel Silverstone

CyberDawn 2009

Opinion
Sep 15, 2009
Security

Cyberdawn 2009 cyberwar exercise

I am honored to be on the planning committee for CyberDawn 2009.

About CyberDawn

CyberDawn, to be held October 3rd and 4th “in” the DC area, and is an open Cyber security and Cyberwar exercise.   “Open” means that people are welcome to attend without invitation 🙂  So “independent security researcher” aka hackers, are welcome to participate.

Where?

The physical  CyberDawn will be hosted by Battlefield High School’s Information Technology and Robotics Programs.  Battlefield High School is located in Haymarket, VA. People and teams will be in closed rooms and doing their magic apart from other teams. 

Who is Putting This Together

Tim Rosenberg, from White Wolf Security, is facilitating this important event.   For more information, or if  you would like to participate, observe, recruit, sponsor, provide event volunteers, or support in any other way, please contact him at 717-295-6201 or tim@whitewolfsecurity.com.

How is CyberDawn Organized

In CyberDawn we will have defending teams, known as Blue Teams, defending digital assets.  They will be defending computer databases and servers against Red Teams, attacking the same networks, servers, and databases and attempting to gain unauthorized access.  Nothing is “pretend” here.  If the hackers succeed, they will own, (or pwn) the data, and the Blues will have some serious egg on their faces.

The planned player classes are:

  1. high school,
  2. college,
  3. civilian,
  4. military, and
  5. government.

Unless they perform rather poorly, a top defending team will be declared for each player class.  A top attacker would be announced too…

Teams and players will be scored across a number of metrics similar to how they would perform in the real world.

In addition to being an exercise, Cyber Dawn will also be a job fair and cyber security awareness event.

What’s the Point?

The point is to learn.  Blues learn about new technologies and ideas and “deviant” thinking.   Reds learn how the best-in-breed protect their networks.

Who’s Going to be There:

Well, here are some reservations already made to CyberDawn 2009 (all nicknames on the Blue side are my inventions):

Partial List of CyberDawn 2009 Participants
On the Blue side: On the Red Side (from over 30 so far):
US Air Force Academy (The Blue Air Defenses) Pauldotcom
US Military Academy at West Point (The Long Grey Queue) Mubix
The Justice League of America (Online) (The Marvels) Delphi
BAE Systems (The Blue Sleeves) ftp
Data Tactics (Strategos) beannieb
ITT Cyber (Blue Mortars) monmoi
Anne Arundel Community College weeblo
Community College of Baltimore County Warezjoe
George Mason University cktricky
University of Maryland, Baltimore County  

For more detail, see theAgenda here (PDF) , theRules here (PDF), and a Scoring Video here.  If you want to see the Network Design, that is here.

Permalink