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We, at Heimdal Security, are focused on educating both our readers and customers through actionable and useful blog articles, security alerts, protection guides, online courses, and other helpful resources designed to enhance cybersecurity awareness.
Through every project, education remains a core focus. Our goal is to make online security and privacy simple and accessible to anyone, and we think this starts with understanding the basics.
We also believe in the power of the cybersecurity community and supporting it as much as possible.
Every time we have the chance to support young and passionate students with their educational endeavors, encourage them to develop security skills and dive deeper into the world of cybersecurity, we do it without hesitation.
With that in mind, we are happy to announce that we are supporting the students from ROC Leeuwenborgh in the Netherlands by providing security software during their upcoming CTF competition.
A Capture the Flag (CTF) competition is hosted at cybersecurity conferences and aims to challenge participants to use their security skills and solve problems by capturing “flags” from the compromised computer networks.
This type of event requires players to register with the red or a blue team and includes a series of challenges that vary in terms of difficulties.
Students from the ROC Leeuwenborgh are competing for the blue team by trying to build their own CTF network with several “flags” and defend them against attacks of the red team.
They will present the network at the Security Congress event, “The Journey of the Digital Experience over cybersecurity” in Brightlands, Netherlands, which takes place on the 1st of February. During this event, there will be security talks held by students, consisting of different workshops, presentations, and demonstrations.
How the Capture the Flag network works
The Dutch students have built their own network using components and resources from their education center, which includes a Ubiquiti Access Point, a router, switches, the RedSocks Malicious Threat Detector (MTD), Network-attached storage (NAS) and 7 servers.
The Capture the Flag environment will be divided into three different levels: beginner, advanced and expert, and will focus on cracking the passwords of the Access Points (which will be encrypted) to get access to the network.
There will be two dedicated servers for the beginner level in which attendees (participants) will have to use the “EternalBlue” exploit used as part of the massive WannaCry ransomware in 2017.
During the CTF competition, participants will solve puzzles of different levels of difficulty (cryptographic, steghide, and others) to get a password that will help them unlock password-protected Word documents placed on the desktop. These docs will give them access to “flags” that will break two more servers in the beginner network. Participants will face more challenges trying to solve more puzzles before they access the advanced network.
The same methods apply for the “expert” level, but at this point, students will use Heimdal Security’s security solution, Heimdal™ Premium Security Home, to monitor networks and make the challenge more competitive.
During this event, participants will have to prove knowledge of offensive and defensive skills for hacking and protecting networks, cryptography, exploitation, etc, and they will work in the team to face challenges and capture all the flags in the specified timeframe.
The best team will be rewarded with attractive prizes.
The Dutch Police also joins the CTF competition
It’s worth mentioning that an important partner of this event is the Dutch Police which will have a separate Capture the Flag network. Given the rise of advanced online threats, phishing, or DDoS attacks, the role of the Police and the IT specialists is indispensable for raising awareness about the importance of cybersecurity.
This CTF competition offers participants the opportunity to “become” IT specialists within the Dutch Police and use their hacking skills to collect as many flags as possible ahead of other competitors. It is mainly focused on cryptography and forensics, and participants are encouraged to bring their own device to join the competition. They will compete in the same environment and the winners will be rewarded with attractive prizes.
This is a great way for students, or professional and amateur hackers from the Dutch region and other places to learn hacking techniques, improve their problem-solving skills, and, most important, gain hands-on practice.
Bottom line, every Capture the Flag competition is a huge opportunity for students and people passionate about cybersecurity to think out of the box and test their team player skills.
If you have all these, take the leap and join the competition on the 1st of February!
More details about the event can be found here and information about the registration is here.
If you are interested in cybersecurity, or you want to embark on a career in infosec, you can always check out our free educational resources and learn how to better protect yourself against cybercriminals attacks.
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