Success for Southampton at Cyber Security Challenge UK Event
By David Young and Izzy Whistlecroft
On the 24th February, David Young, Izzy Whistlecroft, and Andrew Whistlecroft (Izzy’s brother, currently studying at the University of Liverpool) headed to De Montfort University, Leicester to compete in the first of this year’s Cyber Security Challenge UK University competitions (sadly we can’t be too detailed about the challenges themselves as this game will be repeated in the coming months). The three of us were the team “The Hapless Techno-Weenies”.
The competition was Jeopardy-style and run on E2E-Assure’s platform, with a series of increasingly difficult forensic challenges. David spent most of the day extracting information from a Windows XP memory dump using the Volatility Framework, while Izzy and Andrew focused on uncovering mysteries from a set of packet traces. There was also a cryptography challenge that involved factoring a 32-byte number, and some text processing challenges that were highly reminiscent of what the first years are currently being taught in the Data Management module (COMP1204).
A couple of hours into the morning, the team was taken into a different room to do a drone hacking challenge. At the end we received a special mention for being the fastest team to defeat it (taking less than 5 minutes), using techniques honed over a few months of demonstrating for Cyber Security (COMP3201), Implementing Cyber Security (COMP6230), and Secure Systems (COMP3217). It put to use our skills at web reconnaissance and attack, including use of some of Oli’s favourite tools — dirb and hydra.
First place went to one of the teams from DMU, second to some of our friends from Bournemouth and we came in third.
Many thanks to Cybersecurity Challenge UK, De Montfort University and E2E-Assure for organising and hosting the event; we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for future events.
