How to Get the Most out of CyberStart Game

To ensure that you get the most out of CyberStart Game, make sure you understand the key dates and information below, and follow our hints and tips to enhance your Game experience.

The important bit:

In CyberStart Game, you take on the role of a security expert, cracking codes and gathering information to dissect a cyber criminal’s digital trail.

However, it’s important for you to know how Game will work with Girls Go CyberStart’s final stage, the National Championship for Girls Go CyberStart 2019. Make sure you know and understand these key dates:

• CyberStart Game is open to play between Monday, April 22, 2019 and Friday, June 28, 2019.
• However, your CyberStart Game score on Wednesday, May 15, 2019 will be the score used to determine if your school will get through to the next stage, the National Championship for Girls Go CyberStart 2019.
• If your school does make it through to the National Championship for Girls Go CyberStart 2019, your club leader will be notified on Tuesday, May 21, 2019.
• Successful schools will need to select 4 students to compete in the National Championship for Girls Go CyberStart 2019 by Tuesday, May 28, 2019.
• The National Championship for Girls Go CyberStart 2019 will be from Wednesday, June 5, 2019 to Friday, June 7, 2019.

The helpful bit:

Now you have the important dates memorised, we wanted to give you some hints and tips so that you fly when it comes to CyberStart Game!

What to expect from CyberStart Game:

Consisting of over 200 challenges, CyberStart Game offers you both the ability to come back and keep trying over years if you want to fit it around other commitments or to really engage and work through it in a few days.

There are so many different challenges in CyberStart Game, letting you practice security disciplines like Linux, cryptography and programming and introducing you to difficult concepts like SQL injections, buffer overflows and binary patching.

The Bases:

Each of the three bases in CyberStart Game are designed to teach and test you on different skills and needs:

🏣 Headquarters (HQ) base 🏣

The Headquarters (HQ) base focusses your forensic and offensive skills through challenges that pit you against sneaky cyber criminals. You can learn more about HQ and the challenges it’ll pit you against here: https://medium.com/cyberstart-family/cyberstart-game-introducing-the-headquarters-base-8df6bc3ce2e4

🌖 Moon base 🌖

Work through different programming languages at the Moon base. The challenges will get progressively harder until you’ll be the master of writing your own programs in Python.

🕵️‍♀️ Forensics base 🕵️‍♀️

In the Forensics base there are multiple ways to approach each problem. With different techniques and real-world techniques, here you’ll learn the difference between blue and red team tactics.

Essential tools:

A Virtual Machine: After the first few levels in HQ, you will need a virtual machine to be able to continue working through the problems. It’s better to install it sooner rather than later so that you get used to it. A virtual machine lets you run a computer inside a computer, so that you can run different operating systems on the same machine. You can learn more here: https://medium.com/cyberstart-family/preparing-for-cyberstart-game-the-virtual-machine-2bb1b7aadf15

Field manual: Our own little how-to guide that’s intended to give you the basics to help you through CyberStart Game. It’s not a complete guide; we want to encourage you to look things up for yourself too. However, this guide will help you through over half of the levels in Game and will stay in the top left corner as a useful reference.

Your own research: There is likely to be something you won’t know as you move through CyberStart Game’s bases and levels. On some levels, we’ll be encouraging you to work with and understand the same programs cyber security professions use themselves. Striking out and researching how to do something to get round a level is not just encouraged — it’s a necessity as you move to the higher levels of the bases.

Teamwork: Sometimes, working on a problem in a team will mean you all manage to move forwards. In real-world situations, cyber security experts work together to make sure they can all get to the root of the matter as quickly as possible.

What you can expect:

Below we have a video of some of the challenges contained in the later stages of the HQ base.

These will not be the first types of challenges you will be faced with — you will work up to these!

So, remember the dates at the top, and now you’re prepared with tips, tricks and a sneak peak of what’s to come, we hope you enjoy CyberStart Game!

Girls Go CyberStart is a fun and interactive series of digital challenges that introduce high school girls to the field of cybersecurity. Girls compete in three stages for the chance to win cash prizes for themselves and their school plus scholarships towards college. For more information and to register interest for next year, head to: https://ggcs.online/medium