CCDC Ohio Qualifiers 2020 Review

-

Ohio: The most competitive State in the Midwest Region

On February 1st University of Akron won 2nd in Ohio for CCDC State Qualifiers. The team included Logan Curry (Team Captain), Collin Carrick (Linux Admin), Kyle Johnson (Linux Admin), Brandon Musgrave (Web Admin), Nick King (Windows Admin), James Vongsaphay (Windows Admin), Doug Enos (Splunk Admin), Amanda Szampias (Firewall/Network Admin), and Benjamin Russel (Alternate). UA has advanced to the Wildcards Match on February 29.

Other Teams from Ohio Include: Baldwin Wallace University, Cedarville University, Kent State University, Lakeland Community College, Lorain County Community College, Ohio State University, and Tiffin University. That is 8 Ohio teams! OSU, Kent State, Tiffin, and UA are brand new 2020 teams.

Review

This is the first time I competed with a full-sized 8 person team. My past teams had 2, 4, or 5 members. Now we are full power! It was so NICE to stay in my Palo Alto/Windows 8 home base. The team could do more... with more people on the team! We even have a strategic seating arrangement.

Everyone improved the second time around. Brandon kept the CentOS E-commerce and Debian MySQL box safe while the SQL DROP TABLES attack took place. Collin fixed the Postfix and Dovecot services which were down when the competition started. Nick was getting slammed with Windows injects and kept the good fight going! James took control of the Windows 10 box, ran updates, and answered business requests. Kyle defended Phantom and helped on multiple Linux machines. Doug was our main control on Splunk and collected logs using Splunk Forwarders. Doug came up with a good secret idea for the future. I put in some FW rules and answered Palo Alto business tasks. Logan orchestrated multiple documents when a task required all hands on deck. Logan managed work/people and submitted documents on time. Everyone helped out on injects.

I'm personally very excited for Wildcards. Its a second chance to do things better. To implement new plans. To rewrite rules that didn't work. To prepare ourselves for Regionals. Its like a dry-run before the main event. I always treat each competition like its my last.

UA's goal is to get a 1st FIRST place at Wildcards. Right now I'm preparing for Network AND Firewall Regional level injects. I remember last year I started too late. This year I will be returning as a CCNA R&S and CCNA Security. I've improved on the Network front. I want to be Levi Ackerman level when March 13 hits.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Palo Alto for GNS3 CCDC Tutorial

-
Image
Opening Hello fellow CCDC Competitors! Struggling to get a Palo-Alto VM? I know how you can get one! Email me at ASzampiasSWD@gmail.com. I'll tell you the steps to get a PA-VM for GNS3. Why am I giving this info to you? Wouldn't it make sense to hog the info to myself? Wouldn't my team have an advantage? There are have and have not universities when it comes to PaloAltos. I fell into the "have not" group. Our college didn't have access to PA-VMs and still doesn't. Even if PA Cybersecurity Academy is free, there is too much red tape. I can't change the outcome. I can only come up with this one solution. Another reason is Tri-C is a tryout team. I think its pretty unfair as a potential Firewall Admin I'm the only one with access. No one can challenge me unless they spend 2K for a PA-VM. It becomes a rich-person only position. I have a leftover PA-VM from 2018 I promised not to share. I couldn't share that with my challengers. But I f...
Read more

Trace Labs Global Missing Persons CTF V

-
Image
Trace Labs CTF V TraceLabs hosted the Global Missing Persons CTF V event on July 11, 2020. My team //synergy got 64th place out of 190 teams. Introduction This was my first Trace Labs CTF. I captained a team. The good thing about being a captain is you can control who is on the team. My rules were: Must have sock puppet accounts ready. Must have a VPN. Writing out this is a competitive team where we work the entire 6 hours. I was worried about a future team member spamming submissions and disqualifying the team. I thought my requirements would eliminate people who weren't serious. The team hit 4 members Friday evening pretty quickly. Notes My laptop was too slow for this event. My virtual machine froze and I had to restart. Restarting means I have to login to my accounts again. I'll use my desktop next time. The team used Slack and Trello. Our strategy was to research a person and rotate every hour. This strategy broke after 1 rotation. Some missin...
Read more

Release of CCDC ISE Manager Website

-
Image
I worked on the ISE (Inject Scoring Engine) website from 2017 to 2019. I made it to encourage teams to follow a merit-based, open admission tryout format. I identified a problem and made a solution for it. Problem: Call for Merit and Fairness on CCDC Rosters Solution: Github Project Solution: How to run a Team After Tri-C was finished with 2017 Midwest Wildcards I used httrack to grap the Inject PDF files. I didn't grap just the files, but the entire front-end code of the website. If you created the HTML and CSS of the original ISE website, tell me your name so I can give you credit! My goal was to make an almost-replica of the original. The database and back-end code is all guessing by me. I used a LAMP stack because I believe the original website is built on that. I did some fingerprinting and found the "ccdcadmin1" website was hosted on Apache and PHP. If you notice any bugs or errors let me know. If you want a feature added let me know. I will be working ...
Read more