If hacking your neighbour's eyelash stylist WordPress site is no longer a challenge, or if you're looking for a bigger challenge, I think we've got just the thing for you: enter our hacker competition! It's not officially called that, it's an IT security team competition. The National Cyber Security Institute of the National Security Service is organizing the competition in October as HCSC'19 vol.2 (no, not Hardcore Supercharger, but "Hungarian Cyber Security Challenge"!), which is open to all Hungarian citizens over the age of 16 (no upper age limit), and there are no prerequisites (school qualifications). The teams can consist of up to 3 people, and if none of your black-belted, keyboard-destroying buddies is available, no problem, because the organisers will also provide a competition opportunity for those who do not have a team: they will have the opportunity to recruit a team via an online interface. You will need to choose and nominate a team captain.
All you need to know about the competition is that there will be a semi-final and a final. The semi-finals will take place online, while the finals will be held in the Dürer Event Hall (Budapest) with the participation of the finalists. The semi-final will take place between Thursday 17.10.2019 at 20:00 and Sunday 20.10.2019 at 20:00, the final will be held on 29.10.2019 at the National Cyber Security Conference CyberSec2019.hu. Participants will have the opportunity to start the semi-finals in the indicated time window, which they can participate in solving the tasks in their home environment, on their own devices, connected to the platform and using a channel provided by the NSZ NKI.
Prizes: the finalist teams will receive valuable prizes and certificates of recognition. Prizes for the top three teams:
- Third place team: the opportunity to participate (VIP ticket) in the BSides Budapest IT security conference and a full day training;
- Second place team: participation in the OffensiveCon technical IT security conference in Berlin;
- 1st place: an opportunity to attend the technical IT security conference ShmooCon in Washington DC.
The competition will challenge you in the following areas of competence:
- Offensive security (e.g. exploit, vulnerability exploitation);
- Defensive security (e.g. log analysis, network traffic analysis, malicious code analysis);
- Secure programming (e.g. C/C++ and python).
In addition to the technical tasks used in HCSC'19, the competition may also include table top (decision and management), procedural incident management (theory and procedure testing), communication tasks. For the teams participating in the competition, the organisers will provide so-called "capture the flag" (CTF) type tasks through the hosting portal, which will be available in a common task set. Depending on their level of difficulty, the tasks will require basic or more advanced technical knowledge.
There is no entry fee - or at least we don't think there is, as access is provided by the organisers, for a fee - after registration. The operating platform is in English.
One more thing: if there's a Chinese hacker competition, we'll tell you about it ☺
The competition notice is available here: https://nki.gov.hu/intezet/tartalom/hcsc19/versenykiiras/ and this is the competition website: https://www.hcsc19.hu/.
