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AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific CTF 2023

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 22:06:33 GMT

AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific 2023 concluded, and it was a roaring success! Pacific Technologies and Solutions was proud to sponsor and host the Capture the Flag (CTF) events in our custom built cyber range.

Professionals/Military Event Gallery:

Student Event Gallery and Video Recap:

TechNet one of Hawai’i’s largest technology conferences with thousands of attendees that include a mix of service cyber components, agencies, industry, academia, and the military services. Industry exhibitors across multiple ballrooms at the Hilton Hawaiian Village demonstrated a variety of products and solutions.

Pacific Technologies and Solutions was proud to sponsor and host the Capture the Flag (CTF) events in our custom built cyber range.

Participants raced against time and other teams to identify the attacker’s Command & Control addresses and provide forensic evidence to zero in threat actors in the environment. The Red team was actively operating in the environment to generate indicators of compromise, expand access and attempt to stay undetected. The were given a SIEM and other security tools to identify the Red Team’s C2 IP addresses. Each address was a flag. To capture the flag, they needed to provide forensic evidence that the address belongs to Red Tea. A Blue Team won by capturing the most flags in the time allowed and before other Blue Teams.

These two (Red vs. Blue) Threat Hunting style events were held on November 8, 2023.

Event 1: 0930-1300 Students K-12

Event 2: 1400-1800 Military/Pro/Collegiate

5 high schools, 4 from Oahu and 1 from Maui, spent their Wednesday at the conference learning new skills in cyber and in friendly competition with the other schools. It was a great opportunity to give them insight into realistic, active threats that can exist. These students have bright futures ahead of them! See the recap video of the student event here: https://youtu.be/wpWDm9HMEMA?si=mBlJgtEtu_RJqtNn

Schools:

1st Place: Punahou School

2nd Place: Seabury Hall

3rd Place: Mid-Pacific

4th Place Tie: McKinley High School and Hanalani Schools

In the afternoon was the professional/military event. Many participants work at JBPH-H and were very impressive in their threat hunting. Of the 11 flags, both teams captured 6 within the 3 hour vulnerability window, and so it came down to the tie breaker of who caught those flags the fastest.

This team was:

Jordan Provencher-Olaes: Cyber Crew Lead

Roberto Amezquita: Host Analyst

Brayton Acoba: Host Analyst

Zacc Heaussylva: Network Analyst

Brian Singh: Cyber Analyst

James Mannion: Cyber Analyst

Jesse Hakala: Cyber Analyst

It was a successful event supporting local students and professionals, and we got to showcase our COBRA DEN cyber range and its capabilities.

About the COBRA DEN:

It is a cloud-based cyber range that allows for remote participation and continuous training with defensive

cyber capabilities and offensive operator tools. It is a product proprietary to Pacific Technologies and Solutions and is used by several organizations as an on-demand training platform. Contact us if you would like to learn more.

Thank you to everyone that participated, attended, and supported these events! We couldn’t have done it without you all.

Celebrating McKinley High School's JROTC Cyber Patriot Team

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 07:23:42 GMT

Supporting Young Leaders:

McKinley High School's JROTC Cyber Patriot Program took 2nd place at the 2022 AFCEA TechNet Student Capture-the-Flag event (Hosted by Pacific Technologies and Solutions). To celebrate their achievement, we donated $2,000 and a pizza party to their club. Congratulations and mahalo for participating!

Go Cyber Tigers!

About McKinely Cyber Patriot:

The McKinley High School Cyber Defense Team (Cyber Patriot) started back in 2011. Since then McKinley is fortunate to have a JROTC team and a School team giving students a greater opportunity to join. Each team is managed by a Coach, and trained by the mentor(s). Mentors are people from the cyber security field, volunteering their time to teach the basics of Cyber security.

A Hawai'i Statewide Student Cyber Security Competition

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 08:37:10 GMT

Cyber Capture-The-Flag (CTF)

When you think of students playing capture the flag, a first thought is of them running around a field playing tag and trying to grab a physical flag from their opponent’s side. What if we were to tell you that this capture the flag was held online and was training the next generation of cyber security professionals?

Well, this is the case for the AFCEA Hawaii Student Capture the Flag (CTF) event that was held from Oct 20th-Nov 3rd 2022 by Pacific Technologies and Solutions.

So what did this CTF look like? It was modeled to look like a videogame, so it was fun & engaging for the students. The preliminary round was held in October virtually over 3 days and over 14 schools across Hawai’i participated in online challenges to earn points and battle for a spot at the in-person final round.

First, they were all given a set of rules, like don’t hack the other teams or the site. Then they were taught how to VPN to a site where there was a jeopardy-style board with cyber tasks, and all the answers had to be hashed (for example, if the answer was the letter q, then the hash would be: 7694f4a66316e53c8cdd9d9954bd611d

The topics included:

Trivia
Recon
Analysis
Decoding
Exploit
OSINT

And students were taught how to use advanced toolsets including Kali Linux, Arkime, Metasploit, Cyber Chef, Staghide, Zip2John, and a lot of Googling.

The event was hosted on a multipurpose cyber range called the COBRA DEN (Distributed Exercise Network) which is powered by a company called Rangeforce. They build cyber readiness with hands-on skills development and entirely emulated, realistic virtual environments.

“This is a gamechanger!” proclaimed user: kkuyami, a teacher at Kalaheo High school on the windward side of Oahu,

during the connectivity test.

The event communications were held on “Discord” which allowed for messaging, voice & video chats, and screen sharing. There were channels in the server for announcements, general chat, technical assistance, and solutions walkthrough at the end.

Preliminary Round

In the virtual preliminary round, for 60 hours, these students in their teams (along with a coach/mentor assisting) tried to earn as many points as possible because the top 5 teams (of 5) would move onto the finals, held live at the TechNet Indo Pacific conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki. Many of these teams also participate in Cyber Patriot (a national youth cyber education program created in the United States to help direct students toward careers in cybersecurity or another STEM discipline. The program was created by the Air Force Association).

Schools registered:

Aiea HS
Hanalani Schools
Kaiser HS
Kalaheo HS
Kapolei HS
Mckinley HS
Mid Pacific
Molokai HS
Nanakuli High & Intermediate
Seabury Hall
Waialua High & Intermediate
Waimea HS JROTC
Waipahu HS
Washington MS

It came close, but the top 5 schools that went onto the final round were:

1. McKinley High School (Oahu-Public)

2. Hanalani School (Oahu-Private)

3. Seabury Hall (Maui-Private)

4. Mid Pacific Institute (Oahu-Private)

5. Nanakuli High School (Oahu-Public)

Final Round

On November 2nd from 7am-2pm, the 25 students and 5 coaches arrived bright eyed, and bushy tailed to the live final round held in the Honolulu Ballroom III at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki. They got the day off from school to come represent and participate at this prestigious event, lunch included.

They each got their own table in the ballroom to work together from and spent the next 7 hours trying to solve new challenges with the same 5 topics from the prelim round, except a bit more difficult. The password cracking was the favorite topic for one of the teams, who jumped up in excitement when they solved a challenge with less than an hour in competition.

Seabury Hall (Spartans) had the lead for most of the day, but when it came down to the last hour is when the leaderboard shifted around a lot. McKinley High School (Tigers) took the lead with 160 points about half an hour before the end. But in the last 5 minutes, Seabury Hall answered a challenge an took back first place at 166 points. Nanakuli also secured 3rd place within the last 24 minutes with 150 points.

The final scores at the end were:

Seabury Hall Spartans: 166 points
McKinley Cyber Tigers: 160 points
Nanakuli Golden Hawks: 150 points
Mid-Pacific Cyber Owls: 125 points
Hanalani A-Team: 125 points

At the end of the day, there was an awards ceremony with lots of photos to celebrate their hard work and rigor. All participants received certificates, and the top 3 teams got golden trophies. The 1st place winning team also receiving challenge coins and Rangeforce Platform licenses so they could continue learning through a cyber security module library used by professionals.

It was a great event and amazing to see these young adults with bright futures ahead of them!