Background

Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) is a regional competition for NCCDC, created to prepare new cybersecurity professionals with experience in managing and defending existing corporate networks with limited resources and information. Specifically, teams are given access to a number of Linux and windows boxes emulating a corporate network, and are tasked on keeping key services up while red team abuses misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to take down these services.

The Event

In addition to keeping up our key services, we were required to complete business tasks such as preparing C-Suite presentations, updating clients on threats, and adding functionality to the services provided to us or adding new services. Of course, all of this occurred while red team was actively attacking our servers and trying to interrupts our services.

My Place on the Team

This was my first real competition with OSUSEC, and while I had experience with managing a Linux server from my homelab I didn’t have experience dealing with business scale services and servers. This meant that most of my time was occupied with managing and understanding how the Linux services functioned in the network. For instance we were given a couple of web servers, which in my opinion were specifically designed to enable every problematic configuration option possible. It never ceases to amaze me how much you can break a services security with just a couple of configuration changes.

Conclusion and Takeaways

Again this was my first real experience with corporate networks and my first time competing with OSUSEC. As such I spent a good amount of time understanding the services that are usually included on production machines. Besides that though, this competition introduced me to the challenge of communicating security issues to a non-technical audience. Most of my time in cybersecurity before this has been spent with people within the field, which skewed my expectations of common knowledge of computers and security. Working on the business tasks though, specifically the presentation reminded me of the importance of communication of these complex ideas to people who are not specialized in this field. Overall, this was an amazing experience that helped to improve my technical skills with common services used in companies and communicating important ideas to non technical people, I’m looking forward to adding to this experience for nationals!