Welcome to Ixia Cyber Combat – where corporate cyber defenders across financial, technology, government, and educational sectors test their mettle by attacking enemy networks and defending their own servers under real-world cyber-attack scenarios in a safe simulated environment.
Over the 12-hour event, teams attack enemy servers, expose vulnerabilities and discover Cyblocks (units of Blockchain created by Ixia specifically for the event), while defending their own “fortress” from the other teams. Combining the ideas of video gaming and cybersecurity hackathons, Cyber Combat is a highly charged competition, where points are accumulated in defending protected resources (Blue Team) and breaching enemy defenses (Red Team).
Red team players use network infiltration and data exfiltration techniques such as:
- Discovering, enumerating, and infiltrating Windows and Linux servers defended by a Fortinet NGFW
- Exfiltrating and cracking salted, hashed passwords stored in databases
- Searching penetrated machines for valuable data hidden via steganography
- Combing through metadata for breadcrumbs of valuable information
- Writing custom scripts to unlock data
Blue team players defend their assets to respond to many scenarios crafted by Ixia’s Threat Intelligence, by
- Monitoring SIEM and NGFW logs for ongoing attacks
- Modifying configurations to thwart attackers
- Examining network traffic, and correlating events to discover and stop coordinated attacks
