// by tsmith / Kingman, AZ

Hacking from the Passenger Seat

Apache Lodge, Prescott, AZ.

Today’s drive is Prescott, AZ to Beatty, NV (or Rhyolite, if I’m brave enough) but it also coincided with the 2020 CCDC Invitational. For the past few years, I’ve worked as an assistant project manager and scenario writer for the Southwest Collegiate Cybersecurity Defense Competition. This year’s competition in March was cancelled, but we hosted a virtual one-day event today.

About an hour into the game, I started the drive north. Throughout the day, I’ve stopped for a couple hours at a time to work on my pieces and monitor the game.

Black Team focused on building Ansible and Terraform config for automated deployment of an entire team infrastructure.

If I had to spend an entire day on a Zoom, these are the people I’d like to do it with. Though a virtual game just doesn’t have the excitement and zany antics of the in-person experience.

Watching a student’s virtual machine terminal as a fork-bomb from Red Team crashes his computer toward the end of the game.

He reported the outage to his team:

Now that the game has ended, I have to grade the budget forecasts I made the teams write, and then I can head on to my campsite. Tomorrow is hiking in Death Valley!