2024 VIVID Cybersecurity Competition

About the Event

News Flash!

Apex University (AU) announces their new artificial intelligence (AI) research system, Overlord! Professor Rosie Meebs, head of the project, declares “this is a new generation of AI that will reach heights never reached before. Our new code is faster and learns better than anything in existence. We project that in less than 8 months, Overlord will reach singularity and be a true intelligence. We expect once that happens, our AI will be able to solve any number of problems from creating fusion to solving the climate change crisis. Any negative comments are just jealousy, and we know there will be no problems once Overlord comes online. We will turn on Overlord on 1 March 2024 and change the world!”

Red Team

The hubris of mankind knows no end. How a group of academics think creating machine intelligence is a good thing is beyond belief. The danger of artificial intelligence is well known. Just look at the Forbes article[1] that tells us the risks or even Scientific American[2] which describes the menace of our digital overlords. They even had the audacity to call it “Overlord”; we must stop them! 

Fortunately for us, a member of the AU research team that created this monstrosity sees the danger and has told us there is a hidden backdoor to their system that allows remote access. It’s great having an insider that shares our beliefs! Additionally, the creators were at least smart enough to build in an “off switch” but it is protected by an authentication system that needs a digital key. With this knowledge, we can enter the Overlord system and steal the key. Once we have it, we can shut down this monstrosity. Unfortunately, our inside person does not have the credentials to get to the key, so we must break into their system.

Our tasks:

• Recon the Apex University network
• Identify the systems that hosts Overlord
• Distract the security operations center analysts to cover your attack
• Infiltrate the system
• Gain access to the command & control computer
• Find the digital key
• Exfiltrate the key

Blue Team

You and your team are lucky enough to gain experience at Apex University’s (AU) Security Operations Center (SOC). For the last semester you’ve been working three days a week learning the job roles in SOC and expanding your cybersecurity knowledge. While today is usually not a workday, the SOC director called all of you to work and explained the university network was under attack and all the full-time analysts were swamped. The director needs you to work within the network and identify any artifacts in the system indicating threat activity and indicators of compromise.

Our incident response tasks:

• Find artifacts in the system indicating threat activity and indicators of compromise
• Detect the threat actors
• Respond to any malicious activity
• Mitigate threats
• Report what you find