So what happened at the IRISSCON 2019 CTF?

You may have seen a couple of previous blogs in the build up to IRISSCON 2019 where I was helping out at my first Capture The Flag experience, learning what it was all about etc, with the lads from Honeyn3t.

What is Honeyn3t? Honeyn3t is a not-for-profit cyber-awareness mission run out of Ireland. The team, like me, all have day jobs but love a bit of hacking!

Who won? You may have seen my LinkedIn post on the day - the winners were "Team K" led by Philip Close, and included his 11 year old son, Oisin - so that was very cool to see... and a little scary!

Was anyone doing anything naughty? There was a variety of tools being used to monitor the game in progress and capture attempts to game the system. I asked if I could publish these, and was told the recipe is being kept secret for now! I can say that one part of the defense consisted of  routing all network traffic through a span port that was being monitored by a bespoke solution. This data wrapper was then combined with QRadar to give an indicator of potential foul play.

Social Engineering 101! Little did I know but I was to be the target of some social engineering. One of the many challenges for the teams was to get as much information about me as possible in exchange for points. As a sales guy I love a bit of networking, I should have thought it was odd the room as easier to work than usual! In addition to giving up some obvious information I was surprised how one team got some personal information I didn't divulge... nor did I think was available online!

Any feedback? Teams seemed to like the network element of the CTF. There was also a variety of different ways to get points, so each team member was able to work to their strengths. The teams that did well definitely had a strategy to divide up the tasks best suited to them and go after their low hanging fruit quickly.

So what's next? The Honeyn3t team are currently speaking with a few different cyber volunteer groups, and some familiar faces in the industry, to consider events for their 2020 roadmap. They are also heads down relaunching their new website and are excited about it going live. Hopefully this will happen over the Christmas period if the beers and mince pies don't get in the way... they are a volunteer group after all!

For more information on how you can get involved with Honeyn3t, please contact me directly!