A week and a half ago I got to participate in the 2015 Pacific Rim (Pac-Rim) Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition as a member of the Red Team. My more experienced friend Dan has already written a couple of posts about this season's CCDC events (lockboxx) including Pac-Rim. I wanted to use this post not to talk about what I did as a member of the Red Team, but my developing opinions of CCDC and these types of "cyber defense" competitions.
To give context to this post, I'll give a brief description of Pac-Rim's scenario. The Blue Teams were tasked as the IT/Security department of The Center for Disease Control (CDC) while the world experienced a zombie outbreak. While trying the manage their network, they must also address the growing scare of zombies and how that impacted their jobs at the CDC.
As far as network design, the Blue Teams were given an external/public facing network, and a couple of internal networks with varying security levels. From the Red Team perspective we saw 3 primary targets, a VyOS router (VyOS), a Windows 2012 R2 exchange server, and a Fedora 20 web server. Initial scans for vulnerabilities turned up very little. These were pretty modern systems that weren't running a lot of services. Not a lot to attack. The VyOS router did have port forwarding rules set to proxy through connections to servers on the internal network. With this we could see a couple of services beyond the router such as MySQL. For the Red Team, the only way we actually got access to any of these machines was by default credentials.
Leaving default credentials is such a silly thing for Blue Teams to pass up and it is such an easy vector for Red Teams to leverage. Default credentials are usually the very first thing Blue Teams change. That being said, once default credentials have been changed, the Red Team has to be more cunning to find another way into the Blue Team's networks. Unfortunately, for the Pac-Rim event, it seemed that more than half of the teams separated themselves because they changed their passwords quicker than the other teams. I want to focus on this point a little bit more.
When I say that a Blue Team was quicker in changing their default password, I mean they were quicker by a minute, to seconds. This year, we split the Red Team up into cells. Each cell was tasked with attacking a specific Blue Team for the duration of the event. Each cell was to stay in sync with all the other Red Team cells. This sounds like a great concept because it seems very fair. And I agree that it is fair in theory. The issue you run into is the very opening few minutes. This entire event was determined by the first five minutes. The Blue Teams that changed their passwords on the Win2012 Exchange server before their router did better than the students that changed their router's password first. The reason being that the Win2012 Exchange server could be used to pivot all around the internal domain. The router did not provide this type of access. We even had a couple of teams that changed both the router and Exchange server passwords extremely quickly. The result, the Red Team really couldn't do much to them. Now, this isn't meant to be a Red Team sob story. I love when the students lock the Red Team out. That means they are learning, and they are equipped with the skills to make our industry safer. That to me is an amazing thing. The issue I have is that changing 2 default passwords and locking the Red Team out for a day and half is not a learning experience. Further more, since all the Red Team cells are staying in-sync with each other, A Blue Team could get away with leaving a gaping whole in their systems as long as the Red Team cells weren't attacking that particular issue at that time.
The primary point of CCDC is to provide the students with a unique learning experience that they will never get in the class room. At the end of the competition, I got to sit down with the Blue Team I attacked all weekend. They were so full of questions and eager to learn from their experience. The problem was, I couldn't answer all of their questions. Due to a scheduling issue, I had to work alone as a Red Team cell so my focus was extremely stretched. My Blue Team changed their Exchange server password right away and I never got access to it. I only got access to their router and MySQL database. Since most of the Blue Teams' networks was comprised of a majority of Windows systems, I was asked a lot of questions regarding how well they did configuring the workstations, domains, and other Windows related services. Unfortunately I had to tell them that because they changed 1 default password, I wasn't able to give them an accurate perspective. They could have had a terribly configured domain. I wouldn't know. And this was the case for a lot of Blue Teams. They simply didn't get all the feed back that the Red Team could have provided had there been more access.
I go back to the point that CCDC is suppose to be a learning experience. It's hard to find the balance between giving the students unrealistically insecure systems that the Red Team can stomp all over, and modern secure systems where the Red Team still has decent access. I also want to emphasize the point of these competitions is to focus on cyber security. One of my Blue Team members told me that they spent the entire first day (more than 8 hours) dealing with customer phone calls from the Orange Team. What?! Customer service has very little to do with developing cyber security skills. I understand that the Orange Team is there to act as real world customers, but this is a competition. Blue Teams are obviously going to put their best 'people person' on the phone. They probably won't learn anything in terms of how to deal with people and they'll miss out on the actual technical education.
In the end if my Blue Team was able to learn 1 thing, than in my opinion, the experience was worth it. I love doing these types of events as a way to connect with students and provide guidance in a way that it was provided to me. Next week I'll be participating in the South East CCDC regional and my company's own cyber defense competition (PCDC) so I should have a lot more stuff to report on.
