SANS New NetWars Core Version 9

Key Takeaways

foreign [Music] hi my name is Chris elgy I work for counter hack challenges and we build cyber ranges for the Sans Institute we build things like the Sands holiday hack Challenge and core networks tournament and I'm going to walk you through a bit of core networks tournament 9 today I am the head architect of that project and I'm excited that people can can start to play it now it took us quite a while to build and and has a bit of everything so you see I've just logged into the ranges.io platform with my Sans identity so because I have a Sans account I have a ranges account and then I can go into this game and I'm playing maybe because I'm at a large Sans event and there's net wars in the evening so I opted to play and and I'm brought into this this world so so we see here some young teens headed toward what looks like a spooky government laboratory in the woods they might be involved in in things with monsters or or uh or extra strange human powers here but uh their storyline is what brings us through these challenges I think I think the storyline helps helps bring people through the uh the cyber security uh you know technical things they're gonna have to do through through the game so so here as as players click in and see see challenges they can they can hit links here that bring them to a different assets like this Linux virtual machine this is a Linux terminal right in the browser nothing to download no special software to have on the player's computer and you can see I've been I've been punching through some simple challenges here where it has me uh just look at some files add a line to a file and then it any point here I've been able to type hint to see what else I need to do so here it's telling me to change directory into the forest so I took a hint and now I know I can just CD forest and then it says great now we need to look through the contents of the directory carefully uh for hidden looks like I need to find hidden files and if I type hint again it'll tell me what what I should be looking for so here I know I need to ls-a to see all the things and then I have a flag I have net Wars pitfall and again up atop net worth Pitfall so this is when I would leave that VM and go back to the ranges platform and put in the flag and get some points now on the topic of points we do have a running scoreboard here where I can see how many challenges I've solved how many points I've earned I can see my hit right here so I've gotten everything right that I've attempted and I can see I've taken two hints out of a possible 212 hints Tom is beating me on points uh Tom waffles pancakes and toast but there's still time for me to catch up now at a live event we'll also have a big scoreboard up on a projector so everyone can see for for most players it's about enjoying the game having fun maybe working as a team but some do like to compete and win coins so of course we do have to have points and a scoreboard so back to the game if I look at my challenges uh we have like I mentioned earlier we have some cyber threat intelligence uh pieces that are that are that are strung throughout the game that help players not understand just what to do in a given situation but also understand why things are going on so understanding what an uh what an attacker is trying to do to them and why some of these threat Intel questions sort of bring them along that storyline we also have in here some windows challenges and I've solved this one but I'll go to the next one where it's asking me to look at the contents of a file now along with some of these Linux terminals we have we also have a a full windows environment this is a full Windows Virtual Machine up in the cloud built just for my player and I know I need to go into the documents folder and it's asking me for the contents of the only file in here so if I type right side up.txt then it gives me these four words nothing out of the ordinary so I can copy those to my clipboard come back to ranges IO and then paste them in and sure enough I get some points so great catching up on Tom now as I go to the next challenge it's asking me about something in an environment variable if I have no idea what that is again we've got hints here so I can click hint and it says oh maybe try this this command here in a Powershell prompt and I can do that and I can progress through now before we uh before we finish up here I do want to show one more challenge that now you'll see a lot of these are locked out uh we we don't put most of the harder challenges uh in an available State until players have gotten so far because it can be uh can be a bit intimidating right but I did unlock this specific one here where this is a web application penetration testing challenge where we see we've got this adorable character that is trying to collect some dice of those d6s and d20s in another environment so if I click in I'm brought to this web application where I can steer around and I can try to light my torch by clicking on one of these torches and there we go the room is lit and as I go through the the challenges get more and more difficult but again I've got hints here from some of the other characters like nine and Bill and they can help me through so one last thing is that at the end of the event based on how we've performed the the ranges platform will send me a report card and it basically says hey there were this many forensics challenges and you got through you know three of the six and you got through you know eight of the 20 penetration testing challenges and it gives me some feeling of uh maybe what I want to work on next uh in terms of my cyber security Journey do I want to look more at some defense classes or or maybe management or cyber threat Intel so uh that report card will come to me in about a couple of days well that's all we have for right now thanks so much and please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about net Wars thanks