THAT'S A WRAP ON THE 2ND ANNUAL RAZORHACK CYBER CHALLENGE!
What a fantastic weekend! This year RazorHack expanded in a big way, bringing in 34 teams with 130+ participants and 30+ guests from across the nation.
This year RazorHack had great out-of-state representation with two teams from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, one team from Colorado Mesa University, two teams from Mississippi State University, and individual competitors from Missouri and Texas. We also had an abundance of teams from Arkansas this year as well with two teams from Arkansas State University, two teams from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, fourteen teams from the University of Arkansas, 4 teams from the Arkansas 223rd and 189th ANG, one team from Centennial Bank, and one team from HackNWA.
Teams at this year's RazorHack Cyber Challenge were hired as contractors by the newly appointed CIO of RazorPower Co. Shane Barnabas to discreetly determine the cause of the abnormalities in RPCo's nuclear reactor systems. Working with the RPCo employees (gamemasters in costume) the contractors worked to uncover all the issues plaguing RPCo's infrastructure. Over the course of the weekend teams worked to find deleted emails using forensics tools, pwn coffee machines to get RPCo employees more coffee, dissect OT malware using Ghidra, analyze access log files for intruders, recover a website from a group of attackers, gain access to a physical control room and stop a series of attacks against it, fix a control rod SCADA during a nuclear meltdown, and a whole host of other challenges!
This year's RazorHack was made possible by an amazing group of volunteers who worked day and night to make this thing possible. I could not be more thankful to my amazing team of gamemasters who helped realize this year's story and challenges (Gideon Sutterfield, Thomas Winkle, Grant Wilkins, Kate Kettler, Isabella Martinez, Pranav Mahesh, Donna Thakadipuram, Wesley Schwartz, Alex Prosser, Gabriel Garcia). Another huge shout out goes to my co-organizers Evan Glover and Chris Farnell who were instrumental in ensuring RazorHack had the funding, food, drinks, venue space, swag, and equipment needed to be successful!
We could not be more thankful to Fortinet (John Wagnon), Training Camp (Kenneth Sahs), the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Ozark Section, the IEEE Arkansas Section, Arkansas Economic Development Commission, and Daymark for sponsoring this year. Your continued support has an exponential impact on the students and professionals that participate in RazorHack Cyber Challenge each year. A big thank you to Mark Daniel Bowling, Michael Thompson, Major Scott Lang, and Phil Clark for being our opening night speakers as well!
This is only the start for CyberHogs and RazorHack. The team and I look forward to going even bigger next year!
If you didn't get to compete or work with us this year, don't worry, there's always next year! ;)
Shout out to Austin Cook for all the photos!
