Dev and Security Walkthroughs

On March 14, 2020 University of Akron placed 6th out of 9 teams at the Midwest Regional CCDC. Akron placed 3rd during Wildcards and was knocked out of Regionals by 1 spot. Two 1st Place State teams in the Region quit last minute, making room for Akron to compete in their place. Since Akron was notified Thursday at 12pm (Have to leave Akron at 4:30pm to make it to Chicago at a reasonable time), most of the team members had work duties and did not take time off. The Firewall Admin Amanda was the only Akron person who could leave on short notice. Teams that participated were: DePaul University IL (1st) IndianaTech IN (3rd) Purdue University IN Baker College Flint MI Pine Technical & Community College MN (4th) St. Cloud State University MN Baldwin Wallace University OH (2nd) University of Akron OH (6th) University of Wisconsin-Stout WI Missing 1st Place Kentucky NKU and Southeast Missouri Personal Writeup: I've been doing CCDC for 4 years now. Akron is my thir...

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 ...

This might seem counterproductive... but I can't help myself. Unsure how much info I will reveal. Videos Below: MAC Flooding Attack DHCP Snooping and DHCP Exhaustion Attack Setting up NTP Server on Windows 2008

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...

I finally did it! I completed my personal goals for Networking! I used to be a double major in Networking. I didn't consider myself worthy though. I didn't know enough. I made some goals for myself to in-my-mind earn my lost degree that I didn't deserve. My personal capstone was to make a COMPLETE replica of the CCDC topology. I got 80% there. Three things were missing... INTERNET, a Router, and a Switch. I found out today you can import a Cisco CSR 1000v into VM Workstation. And guess WHAT! I figured it out in under 15 MINUTES! Here are my Slack logs: I remember struggling with this "internet" issue on the PA-VM for an ENTIRE WEEK. I just blew Amanda-2018 out of the water by 10000%. I seriously lost 16 hours with "trying to get internet to my VM Workstation" in 2018. Looking back on it I was in Cisco 1 and HAD no idea what I was doing. I was playing around with EIGRP and OSPF and that wasn't taught until Cisco 3. I'm in a pretty un...

Here is the link to the presentation Summary: I was asked to talk about NCL Steg and Log problems. I found some Log problems from 2016. I shared some useful programs for Steg. Dylan presented four Steg problems at the meeting. His work was really impressive. We talked about CCDC after. An idea was brought up over the "Team Captain" title. The concern was people would think the Team Captain was MVP of the team and tryout for the wrong reasons. I made a compromise on the website and added (Client Services Admin) in parenthesis. We just need to make it clear Team Captain is not MVP and students should pick Team Captain for the right reasons. We got one tryout signup. Mindy made some cool posters to advertise the Cybersecurity club. She brought up locksport and lockpicking at our next meeting. We plan to go on an advertisement spree at the different Tri-C branches.

Mindy Klem and I worked on the Tri-C CCDC website . I've been hosting it for two days now. Expect a slight outage while I transfer hosting from my Desktop (VM Production) to a Raspberry Pi. I still need to buy the Pi from BestBuy today. Here is the Github link . If someone wanted to copycat the website, they could just do View Source. I didn't see any harm putting the code on Github. We used HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. I want to bring the website to 2019 by using Angular or something trendy. I want some elements to convert into components. That way I don't have to copy and paste the header and footer 10 times on each page when I change something. I might make this a "mission" for someone that wants to be the Web Admin. My English writing was atrocious while making this! I'm either on or off the mark. It's all or nothing with my writing. I know when I hit a homerun and I know when it sucks. Some sentences are cringy but I couldn't think of a way t...

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 ...

I wish I could say a cool enemy like MHA Eraser Head or The Akutski but we weren't looking at all. Lakeland was acting like the Birdbox protagonists. We had our blindfolds on and continued about our day. "Birdbox Enemy" is more of a reflection on us then the hackers. The Plan: If the hackers got the Router, Switch, or Firewall we were done for. I saved those three devices first while abandoning everything else. Adam changed the default passwords on the end devices and that was it. We were a Services and Injects team only. We had no time for incident reports. No time for IoT. No time to secure anything good enough. No time to monitor the hackers. I did customer calls. We passed around the audit packet like a hot potato. We were killing it on Services. We were doing great on Injects too. Its all that Extra stuff that got to us. We weren't over-capacitated in the realm we created but in everything we abandoned. The whole idea about throwing the end-devices overboar...

  Trend in CCDC Roster Makeup I’ve noticed a trend in CCDC roster positions. Most of the time on a team women fall into three positions: 1. Team Captain 2. Inject Manager/Policy Writer 3. Alternate Team Size 0-1 women on a team Why do I keep seeing this pattern over and over again? Where are the Firewall, Linux, Windows, Web, IoT, Network and Splunk Admins? Incident Responders? I don’t think every woman wants or asks to be in a leadership role. Are women encouraged into this structure by faculty coaches? Do all the guys on the team want admin positions and women get whatever is leftover? Do faculty coaches trust male ability in technical positions and assign the soft skill side to women on the team? Why am I talking about this? I’m hoping faculty coaches will see this post and rethink how they assign positions. Or they become aware that this is happening. I see the majority of teams meet the criteria up above. How this happens 1. Grandfathering "Since you were th...

CCDC Free Agent: Looking for a team to join I'm looking to join a CCDC team outside of Ohio. I will be available to move October 2019. This team can be outside the Midwest region. I can be part-time for winter semester and full-time for CCDC season. Chicago is an ideal location but I'm open to anything. I can enroll in a Masters program, take a few masters classes, or take random intro courses. I took Cisco classes + random intro courses this year at Lakeland to fulfill the full-time student requirement. About Me: I'm currently a Salesforce Developer in Cleveland. I've been working on E-Commerce sites for the past ten months. I've worked on public and private sector projects as a technical consultant. I graduated with a Software Engineering bachelors in 2018. I'm the most extreme and dedicated CCDC player you will ever meet. I started a CCDC team at Cuyahoga Community College in 2017. I competed for Lakeland Community College in 2019. I worked full-...

Team Lakeland vs. Polite Slenderman. Review of 5-State Qualifiers The Enemy I categorize the enemy as 'Polite Slenderman'. Why? The hackers didn't destroy any boxes beyond repair. They would change a line of config and that's it. Polite Slenderman sat idle on boxes, just watching us. It felt like playing Where's Slenderman and Slenderman would get angry if you didn't notice him in 2 hours. Slender Activity "Oh hello Slender! You've been in this box for 22 minutes! I should've kicked you out sooner! Thanks for sitting like a duck and visiting. Out you go now. Have a good day." Polite Slenderman broke into Debian MySQL, Ubuntu DNS and the Splunk box. One hacker really wanted to lounge in that Splunk box. I would kick them out, retype iptables, shut down sshd (I think?) and they would be back. Slender would change enableSSL=0 to 1. I had to change that config three times. Debian I only had one issue, kicked them out, and didn't see a...

Last year at Midwest Regional's I was very hungry. The food provided at Midwest wasn't even vegetarian. Every meal option had meat on it! The Tri-C team took a plane to Regionals so I couldn't pack vegan snacks. The only Grubhub option available was a 2nd rate Naf Naf. I ate 2-3 repeating meals from this place. I was not a happy camper. I promised myself that if Lakeland won Ohio, I would become the unofficial self-appointed CCDC Special Diet Ambassador. Well here I am. Here are some of the items I'm purchasing for MW. I have 5 years of experience being a vegan. All of the stuff I'm buying will be unopened. Here is a list of things I'm buying: Eat Freely Chocolate Chip Cookies Late July Jalapeno Chips Fruit Gushers Good Health Gluten-Free Pretzels Hippeas Vegan White Cheddar Puffs Earth Balance Vegan Cheddar Squares Snacks I find at Mustard Seed Market in Ohio If you want something, let me know. As always, make sure to re...

On February 2 Lakeland Community College won 1st in Ohio for CCDC State Qualifiers. The team was composed of Adam Stephens and I, both Cisco 3 students. We are the smallest team to ever win in Ohio and advance to Midwest Regionals. To top it off we placed 4th out of 20 teams overall in 5 states. Our two person team faced against other teams that had up to eight members. I served as the Firewall, Web, Windows, Linux, and Splunk Admin. Additionally I did Inject Management and was the Team Captain. Adam was the Linux/Windows Admin and Inject Manager. I put a lot of time, money, and effort into CCDC. I studied two hours every day after work. I originally started out as a Web/Linux Admin and had to self-learn Firewall and Windows administration. Over the Summer I coded the entire Inject Scoring Engine website. I have an entire binder filled with notes that gets bigger everyday. I created my own identical lab environment from the ground up. I started my own team at Cuyahoga Community Col...

Materials You might need this. Here is the packet from 2019 Midwest Qualifiers: Midwest Qualifier 2019 Packet SOLVED Question 1: Why did these Palo-Alto FW rules fail? My tried-and-tested rules failed during Qualifiers. It took me a total of 16 minutes to input them into the PA Web GUI. My first guess is it has something to do with NAT? Do I have to put the NAT IP Address into the destination address too? I have no idea how to implement NAT with a virtual router and my unmanaged router at home. I can't test NAT in my own lab environment. Note: Rule "anything" is disabled. I use that for emergencies only. I don't set the "Default" rule, the PA will disallow everything with 0 rules. SOLVED Question 2: Why can't I nmap/ping/reach services from the External Windows 10 host? I tried playing with the IP and subnet mask on the Win 10 box. No dice. I had a PA any-any rule so I don't see how that was a problem either. Any ideas? I did not che...