Kaspersky Lab is launching the fourth international industrial Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition and inviting ethical hackers, known as whitehats, from across the world to test the security of smart devices and industrial systems.
Any release of a new piece of technology is usually followed by waves of hacking attempts, as cybercriminals search for vulnerabilities. However, unlike blackhats, who are looking to exploit systems and new technologies for illegal purposes, whitehats are working towards the prevention of criminal acts and their consequences. Once a vulnerability is found, whitehats hand their research directly to vendors so the software can be immediately patched. The annual CTF competition gathers the most talented whitehats from across the world to challenge their expertise with practical tasks. As all the participants are trying to resolve actual problems in cybersecurity, rather than artificial scenarios, the impact of the findings will be significant and a number of previously unknown vulnerabilities and attack vectors will be discovered during the competition.
The teams participating in the Kaspersky Lab industrial CTF will also be given an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in the finals held at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit (SAS) in Singapore next year. Prior to this, online qualifying rounds will be held on November 23-24, 2018. Participants will be asked to resolve different types of challenges, including questions and tasks in cryptography, reverse engineering, web-vulnerabilities, network protocols and other popular task categories. There is also a ‘fun’ segment, which will include unexpected and creative puzzles that require a holistic approach.
To ensure the competition represents a realistic environment, organisers will evaluate participants according to the factual difficulty of the tasks and uniqueness of the knowledge required to solve them. This is why the reward for each question will be evaluated in real-time and change in accordance with the number of teams who managed to solve it. This means that puzzles solved by the largest number of participants will be worth the least points, while challenges that prove to be sophisticated enough to be cracked by only a few entrants will be more valuable. The top three teams with the largest score will compete to be crowned the overall winner in April 2019 during the SAS event. All travel and accommodation expenses for the top three teams will be covered by Kaspersky Lab.
“We are becoming increasingly surrounded by smart devices and we rely on them in our everyday lives more and more. As our use of these devices grow, so does the amount of IoT malware. We are looking forward to this year’s competition, which we think will give us unique insights into the landscape of smart device security. To maximise the impact, we will make an effort to tweak this year’s finals slightly to the whitehat competitions that have taken place previously. Participants will face surprises, as they would in real life, whilst they try to resolve cyberthreats,” said David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
said David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT.
To participate in the Kaspersky Lab Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition, please register at http://ctf.kaspersky.com
Registration is open until November 24, 2018.
About Kaspersky CTF
This is the third annual Kaspersky Lab CTF competition, designed to challenge participants to solve industrial cyber security problems. Since 2015, more than 300 teams have already participated in competitions, getting their hands on advanced models of different enterprise systems. Contest conditions are always close to real-life: Kaspersky Lab provides exact copies of the systems and equipment installed in modern enterprises.
About Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky Lab is a global cybersecurity company, which has been operating in the market for over 20 years. Kaspersky Lab’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into next generation security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialised security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky Lab technologies and we help 270,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at www.kaspersky.com .
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