2021 Canadian Cyber Defence Challenge
May 5th - 7th, 2021
2021 Virtual Event
This year we have teamed up with the Vancouver International Privacy & Security Summit (VIPSS) to host our ninth annual cyber defence challenge to be held May 5 - 7, 2021. This year’s event will be a completely virtual event challenge. The event activities will be available online to virtual participants/schools registered across the country.
This year’s event spans three days - coinciding with the virtual conference. Students will be provided free passes ($350 value) to the VIPSS conference and may optionally virtually attend any sessions on Day 2 and Day 3 of the competition. Passes also allow students to watch any recorded sessions from the conference.
Day 1 - May 5th
The first day will be the online cyber defence range that is integrated with a business forensics study and analysis. The business story is made of a series of pre-recorded audio scripts that enact a simulated cyberattack on a hotel. Students will need to listen carefully to the story and pull together the cybersecurity challenges and forensics associated with the crime to solve the business challenge. The students need to keep track of their forensics to develop their recommendations. This year’s event challenge for Day 1 will run from 9:00 AM - 7:00 PM CST. The system will be available for the full 10 hours. We are planning to have industry professional volunteers assigned to support each of the virtual teams.
Day 2 - May 6th
During the second day, the top 8 teams will have the opportunity to present their findings and recommendations based on their business forensics and technical analysis in front of a panel of industry professionals who serve as the judges for this portion of the competition. Teams will be evaluated, points will be assessed and submitted for final processing. Once again, as in previous challenges, overall winners are based on a combination of technical, business and presentation points.
The timing for the final presentations (Day 2) has not been published - but we expect it will take place sometime in the morning - or over the lunch hour.
Day 3 - May 7th
The winners will be announced to an industry audience as part of the closing activities of the VIPSS conference.
“People are often the weakest link in a security chain, because they are not trained or generally aware of what security is all about. Employees must understand how their actions can greatly impact the overall security position of an organization”
— Chelsa Russell @ SANS Institute
The Challenge
The CCDC event is designed around the cyber security industry's Digital Forensic Incident Response (DFIR) process - which includes the following steps:
Breach discovery
Incident containment and remediation
Determining how the breach occurred
Analyzing the compromised and affected systems within the organization domain
Identifying and understanding what the attackers had access to and potentially took
Reporting and communicating
Participants will be grouped into teams of four or five and immersed in a real-time security event. Participants are expected to detect the risk and the nature of the attack, isolate the attack vector and mitigate the risk.
Participants will then analyze the operation environment to determine whether any information assets have been compromised. Once the participants have assessed the information assets and the system environment, they will summarize their findings and formulate their recommendations for the organization that will include steps to implement preventive security measures designed to reduce the risk of future similar attacks from compromising the organization.
CCDC utilizes the latest in virtual technology to host and present a variety of targets for teams made up of high school students. Each target is a separate Operating System broken down between windows flavoured targets (XP to Windows Server 2008 R2) and open source Linux and Unix distributions.
Capture the Flag (CTF)
CCDC has designed a modified version of the traditional Capture the Flag (CTF) which combines the "jeopardy style" capabilities of a CTF with the offence and defence skills. Teams are awarded “points” for securing targets. Each target, open source or windows, has major security problems which can largely be identified by the following categories:
Services and Software that should never be found in a corporate network
Ridiculously bad configurations of services and software
Unsecured confidential information
Outdated highly vulnerable software
Present the Findings
The second part of the CCDC event is focused on developing leadership skills and communicating complex information to a non-technical audience – skills that industry believes are important for success. The teams have the opportunity to present their findings, recommendations in front of their peers - which in turn, helps them develop their leadership and communication skills.