Cyber Patriot Round 3 Struggle

My experience with Cyber Patriot round 3. It’s wasn’t so good…

LINK: Image representing Cyber Patriot.

Basic Overview:

Alright, I came into round 3 thinking that I should be able to at least get 60+ points in the ISO I was focused on(Windows Server 2016), but that was just a dream. It started off feeling pretty easy in my opinion. The forensics questions were way easier to me than the ones from round 2, which gave me some confidence. Sadly, that confidence faded as I began to do other parts. I noticed that I was getting fewer points for doing things that I did in the last round. Not too long into the 6 hours, I was able to do about 16 problems, then be completely stumped. All my checklist and ideas would not yield me any more points.

Issue:

Normally, I do not make any dumb mistakes that will cause me to lose points, but for some reason, I was careless this round. I accidentally deleter a user, losing me 5 points. I could easily create a new user with the same name to get the points back, but I also deleted their files, making me lose another 5 points that I could not get back. I decided to restart the ISO so that I could get the 5 points back, which caused me to waste a little bit of time, but not too much.

LINK: Image showing that my system was slow.

Another issue I had was trying to update Windows. For some reason, even though I had more than enough RAM, it just would not update Windows. Whenever I tried, my pc got extremely slow and unresponsive. I would leave it alone for a while only to come back and see that it is still at 0% completion. After several attempts, our time limit was about to be reached, so I had to just give up on it. I was just not able to update Windows, causing me to lose out on some points. I wonder why it was so laggy and just would not update?

Things I Did Not Like:

The thing that I did not like the most, was doing things that the read me ask for, but are not rewarded any points for doing so. I would update FireFox and other programs to the latest version like it asked me to, but I did not get a single point for doing so. It felt like taking time to find an old paper for a friend to look at, only to find out that your friend doesn't need it by the time you found it. It was not a good feeling…

LINK: Image representing how difficult this was.

Another thing that I did not like, was how much harder it got. Going from round 1 to round 2 was not that big of a difference. Going from round 2 to round 3 was a way bigger difference than I was expecting. I honestly thought that I was going to get less than I did from round 2, but not like 35 points less. It kinda surprised me with how much harder this round was compared to round 2. I know that we were in gold tier, but that just makes me wonder how hard platinum must have been. I’m also just amazed that there are even more rounds after this one…

What’s Next:

If my team somehow makes it to the next round, there is a lot of things that I need to improve on. I think that I got the forensics questions down now, but I am really lacking in knowledge on how to secure the system. I tried everything I knew and could find, but I was still missing tons of points, so I need to better prepare myself for the next round. Hopefully, I can find more checklist that has more info on what should be done for points.

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Thanks for taking your time to read my blog :)

If you have more time, check out my other blogs in the links down below.

Cyber Patriot Round 2 Baby!

First Go At Cyber Patriot!