Passed my CEH and took part in a CTF

2016-07-05 20:10:00

Today was a day well spent!

This morning I passed my CEH examination in under 45 minutes. Bam-bam-bam, answers hammered out with time to spare for coffee on my way to Amstelveen. A few weeks back I'd started this course expecting some level of technical depth, but in the end I've concluded that CEH makes a nice entry-level course for managers or juniors in IT. One of my colleagues in the SOC had already warned me about that ;) I still had lots of fun with my fellow IT Gilde members, playing around during the evening-time classes set up in cooperation with TSTC.

Why go to Amstelveen? Because it's home to KPMG's beautiful offices, which is where I would take part in a CTF event co-organized by CQure! This special event served as a trial-run for a new service that KPMG will be offering to companies: CTF as a training event. Roughly twenty visitors were split across four teams, each tackling the same challenge in a dedicated VM environment. My team consisted mostly of pen-testing newbies, but we managed to make nice headway by working together and by coordinating our efforts through a whiteboard. 

This CTF was a traditional one, where the players are assumed to be attacking a company's infrastructure. All contestants were given VPN configuration data, in order to connect into the gaming environment. KPMG took things very seriously and had set up separate environments for each team, so we could have free reign over our targets. The introductory brief provided some details about the target, with regards to their web address and the specific data we were to retrieve. 

As I mentioned, our room was pretty distinct insofar that we were 90% newbies. Thus our efforts mostly consisted of reconnaissance and identifying methods of ingress. I won't go into details of the scenario, as KPMG intends to (re)use this scenario for other teams, but I can tell you that they're pretty nicely put together. They include scripts or bots that simulate end-user behaviour, with regards to email and browser usage. 

CQure and KPMG have already announced their follow-up to this year's CTF, which will be held in April of 2017. They've left me with a great impression and I'd love to take part in their next event!


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