Twenty Eight: CCDC Cat and Mouse

Being on the CCDC team, I’ve been trying to prepare for the upcoming competition season. I’m on the Windows team, so I am trying to compile some scripts to run in the first couple minutes when we get access to the infrastructure. I have yet to participate in an actual CCDC competition (only Cyberforce), so I’d like to hit the ground running.

While I work on that, it makes me think about (and appreciate) the vicious cat-and-mouse game that is played between Red Team and Blue team in the competition environment. I love the idea of trying to predict and remediate Red team’s attack vectors beforehand, and do my best to stop their plans before they use it to attack our infrastructure. Unfortunately, the truth is that we will absolutely be breached, but it would be nice if I could at least put up some tough obstacles for certain attack vectors. I won’t be able to cover the whole attack surface, of course. I appreciate this cat-and-mouse game because both sides need tricks up their sleeves. Red team needs to find any new paths or try as many vectors as they can until something works, and Blue team has to apply bandaids to every gaping hole they can find in hopes of stopping as many attacks as possible. It’s a losing game for the Blue team, but I think that in the case that Blue team reaches the Nirvana state of kicking out Red team, it would be such a wonderful feeling.

I look forward to the competition season just as much as I am nervous about it. I’ll prepare as best I can for when the time comes, and hopefully my efforts pay off.