2023 Cyber Launch Event

date

Apr 12, 2023

slug

cyber-launch

author

status

Public

The Morning Of

The morning of the event started just like any other, with the bus that takes me to school being late because the county we’re in is short drivers, making it hard to get consistent and reliable times for pickup and drop-off. To make it to the charter bus the school rented for the event in time, I had to quickly speed-walk, walking on the curb around the parking lot to make it to the opposite side of the school in hopes that they would not leave without me. Luckily, I made it and then was seated and on my way to the event at the Bryan Glazer JCC in Tampa.

Picture of the Charter Bus:

The Event

The event began in an interesting way: with chocolate cake and a key lime pie-esque desserts, something I have never experienced before. We then heard a few key speakers present before preparing for the first surprise competition: who could solve a rubix cube. With an Opera-style intro, the announcer told us to check under our seats a begin, as we only had a minute or two to solve the cube. After scrambling for around thirty seconds, we began trying to input the pattern into Google (that was allowed), but we quickly found that that would not be possible due to the slow connection and bailed on that idea, leaving us with the cube incomplete.

Following this, our first main challenge was to fulfill an incident response competition hosted by Raymond James, where we had to investigate what happened to a fake Tampa-based company and then write a report answering seven different questions. Our team worked hard to find out clues, and eventually discovered every little piece that made up the puzzle that was figuring out the incident, including that the attacker exploited a vulnerability detailed in CVE-2000-0886. We had to rush to write up the executive summary for it, which I believe eventually cost us the points we needed to advance higher in the leaderboards; however, following this, we were placed sixth.

The next step on the agenda was lunch and the presentations during while we prepared for the second main competition, two NICE Challenges. When our team was presented with these, we finished them both in under a minute and ten seconds each, as we had practice many for the days leading up to it as mentioned in my first post.

Picture of the Entrée:

This event did not come without its challenges, as well. Throughout the entire second segment where teams had to compete on the NICE Challenge platform, many ran into issues where they had trouble loading the pages with their internet connection, had trouble logging into the platform itself, and more. When the first place champion of the event was crowned, I believe that for this reason it was only scored on everything preceding this event, as no scoreboard appeared after the NICE Challenge although it did for every other.

Picture of the Event:

Conclusion

This event, although it had its difficulties, was a very enjoyable experience and gave me more insight into the field as a whole and what change I can make to benefit others. I look forward to next year’s event and others like it that I may attend next year.