War Games – The cyber warfare event

On 14th December, War Games, a cyber-warfare event was organized at Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology.  The theme was “Defend”. Innovate. Disrupt”. War Games was an open event. Anyone with an interest in computer security or an interest in solving puzzles could participate in the events. The key audience for the event was college students, corporate professionals and security professionals. It was held on the occasion of completion of ten years of Team Matrix. 

There were three events: Heist, Jailbreak and Capture the Flag.

Heist consisted of a matchup between two teams namely, Red Team and Blue Team. Red Teams are entities dedicated to testing the effectiveness of a security program or infrastructure by emulating the tools and techniques of likely attackers in the most realistic way possible. The practice is similar, but not identical to, Penetration Testing, and involves the pursuit of one or more objectives—usually executed as a campaign. On the other hand, Blue Teams work on constantly defending the system against the Red Team actively detecting compromised vulnerabilities and patching them in real time.

The second event was Capture the Flag or CTF consisted of a series of challenges or puzzles that vary in their degree of difficulty that required participants to exercise different skillsets to solve. Once an individual challenge is solved, a “flag” was given to the player and they submitted this flag to the CTF server to earn points.

In the event, a vulnerable system was set up. The Red Team will be tasked with finding these vulnerabilities and exploiting them while the Blue Team needs to detect these vulnerabilities within a specific time period and patch them. 

The last event Jailbreak was an event involving an escape the room scenario. In this event, players were locked in a jail. They had to solve puzzles and challenges to find their way out.

All in all the event tested the mettle of the participants thoroughly and served as a cybersecurity awareness exercise. The success of the event lies in the fact that both the organizing team and the participants walked away from the event with a sharpened understanding of information security. This is one of the proactive methods by which we can actively increase our awareness against one of the most prominent threats present in the modern world.