I love the competition and I am a firm believer in the open sharing of knowledge and education. My philosophy was that if you throw 30 students in the deep end and 8 of them figure out how to swim you will have a good team ready to go. The time frame is extremely tight to learn an insane amount of new technologies, strategies and the “meta” of the competition. This is (roughly) how our weeks we structured throughout the year. ...
Here is my recommendation for quickly learning at least the basics of infrastructure: Hardware: If you can start with a cluster of at least 3 computers. If not a single computer for a hypervisor will work If not then VirtualBox or VMWorkstation will get you started with the absolute basics until you can get a hypervisor If you have a couple old computers or laptops (at least 8gb ram each) then start with those. ...
Overview WRCCDC (Western Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) drops every team into an identical, pre-built network that has to be brought under control quickly. This script is the first thing that runs on the team’s VyOS router: it figures out which interface is WAN and which is LAN without assuming a fixed device name, renumbers the router onto the competition’s expected subnet, sets up the NAT rules needed to bridge the two, and locks down a handful of default services before the clock really starts. Below is a section-by-section walkthrough of how it works. ...
Problem: Let’s Encrypt certificate expired Time 1 minute Solution: All you have to do is run a single command: sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool Enter the domain names of your website and press enter. I choose to enable HTTP -> HTTPS redirection, because I want users to use the https version of the site. I also went with www to non-www redirection because I already have a dns rule that points all www requests to the non-www address, so this should make no real difference but seems simpler to me. ...
Problem: In the CCDC competition often the default passwords are insecure and it is good practice to immediately change all passwords on the AD server. We are then required to send a csv file with all the updated passwords for each user. Solution: A powershell script that can run on any windows server version 2012 R2 or newer. Requirements for script: Has to change ALL AD user passwords Generate secure passwords Create a csv file with username, and new password Must work on at least Windows Server 2012 Getting the AD accounts: ...
Date: Oct. 06, 2021 Time: 1 hour Problem: My Dell Poweredge r510 abruptly shutdown, and would not power back on. How the problem was resolved: Was the problem resolved? No, the initial problem was fixed, the server booted and all checks were good, but it failed again after a month. Update 2024: The issue seems to persist, occasionally powering off abruptly. It happens about once every few months. ...