Cyber Defense
2008 IT-Olympics Cyber Defense Scenario
2008 Remote Setup Documentation
2008 IT-Olympics Venue Document
Each venue has three components that the teams will be judged on as described
in the venue document: community service; the primary competition; the real-time competition. Please read them, as well as the scenario, for full details.
The goals of the competition are to promote interest and exploration of information technology through a fun, unrestricted learning environment that encourages collaboration and experiential learning.
The cyber defense competition, one of the three venues in the IT-Olympics, is a capstone event for those high school students who have chosen to learn and experiment with information assurance and cyber defense. Each school's IT Club can field a team of three to ten students to compete. Additional teams per school can be admitted with the permission of the event director.
The event allows students to practice what they have learned from their experimentation in their own cyber security labs. Approximately one month prior to the cyber defense competiton each team is given a network specification document that describes in detail the corporate environment and network services that are expected to be configured on the equipment in the ISEAGE facility. They are also given remote access to eight computers on which to setup services such as email, web, ftp, remote programming and domain name service. The teams may also be required to setup and/or provide support for an end user machine such as Windows XP or Windows Vista and potentially be asked to configure wireless access. They may also install any open source firewall software to help protect their network.
Additionally, each team must submit a poster for display and judging during the competition which demonstrates their community service project completed prior the the IT-Olympics. The poster will be judged and will contribute to the overall competition scores.
Student teams are allowed physical access to their equipment 10 a.m. on Friday of the competition at which time they may finish any configuration necessary.
Penetration testing of the network performed by graduate students and IT professionals begins that evening and continues throughout Saturday. Additionally teams are required to constantly change and enhance their corporate networks to simulate a true network environment in which additional services and requirements are a reality.
The teams that play in the cyber defense competition are:
Blue Team - Each team, consisting of three to ten high school students, has to set up a network running certain services and defend this network for an extended period of time against the red team. Over the competition duration, the team members will also be asked to participate in the anomalies introduced by the green team. By successfully completing each of the tasks they better their overall score for the competition.
Red Team - The red ream consists of industry leaders and graduate students in the area of information assurance. It is the job of the red team to evaluate the security of each team’s network and try to penetrate their networks using any means possible. At the end of the competition, the red team conducts a debriefing with the blue teams to let them know what the teams did particularly well or what they need to work on for future competitions.
Green Team - Students and professionals who volunteer their time to test the useability of systems and to make requests for changes. The changes range in simplicity from being as easy as changing a password to as hard as hosting a file on a secured ftp server. They also can include power outages, fire drills, hardware failures, software upgrades or any number of events that happen in a corporate environment.
White Team - The white team consists of faculty members and industry professionals who act as judges in the competition. They enforce the rules of the competition, as well as track the scoring of the event. They also have the honor of announcing the placings during the awards ceremony.
