MENA INFORMATION SECURITY CONFERENCE- HACKATHON 2018

Aligning with the objectives of the Security Engineering Lab (SEL), the Cybersecurity Club participated in the Cyber Sabers Hackathon in Riyadh – November 6th and 7th, 2018. Engaging PSU students was priority. The club organized the student's registration and conducted several meetings/tranings with the team members. During this entire process, SEL lab was actively involved with the students, reminding them about the importance of activating cyber security in KSA and its positive outcomes in the future. About Cyber Saber Hackathon MENA ISC Hackathon is a Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition framework. This competition aligned closely to the Saudi Vision 2030. The aim of the Hackathon was to enable invited students from selected KSA universities to participate in a real-life simulated challenges, which included several attack scenarios. As a result, the competition gave students the opportunity to challenge their technical talents. Competing Subjects The teams were divided into RED (attack) and BLUE (defense) team scenarios. These scenarios have different difficulty levels. There were more than 40 servers to be discovered and more than 200 services to be hacked, with a total of more than 1000 findings and treasures. The team got points for each discovered flag. During the Competition The participants were required to bring their own laptops to connect to a local area network and register their teams. All required tools had to be pre-installed by the participants, to perform a full set of penetration tests on the smart city model. The smart city was a simulated model of Riyadh city. The participants could hack the city in order to stop, manipulate, or cancel the services provided by the city. Access Denied Team The club organized the formation of the team, supervised the training process and gave feedback and support. The team involved 5 members. The team solved many challenges and scored 20700 points. The challenges covered the following areas: Cryptography, Digital Forensic, Reverse Engineering, and Web Exploitation. “The Cyber Saber hackathon is a great opportunity to promote cyber and information security awareness across our students. Furthermore, it engaged the participated students with real-life scenarios which provided them the technical skills needed to advance their computer security knowledge. " Aala Khayer, club coordinator. "The competition offered me an exciting experience to boost my technical skills and undergo in hacking scenarios. I encourage anyone interested in the field security to participate in such competitions." Arwa Alabaad, team leader.