Kaspersky Lab has assembled IT security experts from around the globe to participate in the third edition of the international hacking challenge, the Industrial Capture the Flag (CTF) 2017 security competition.
The contest was established in 2015, and is designed to challenge participants to solve industrial cyber security problems centred on industries such as energy, gas and oil, and transportation - those industries with critical infrastructure which are essential to the functioning of societies and economies.
According to Kaspersky, participating teams will be challenged with the task of hacking into a virtual miniature process model, which replicates a real production-site facility at an oil refinery. Participants are expected to research virtual pieces of industrial control systems and discover unobvious security problems.
Contest conditions are always close to real-life - Kaspersky Lab says it provides exact copies of the systems and equipment installed in modern enterprises.
"The organisation of such events is highly important to help develop understanding of the industrial threat landscape," says Vladimir Dashchenko, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
"At our CTF competitions, we offer participants the chance to hack models of real enterprises, therefore everything that happens at a CTF site can also happen to real critical infrastructure and industrial systems. So, it provides opportunities for security researchers, as well as ICS vendors and system integrators, to better understand how incident command systems work and improve their security."
The competition, according to Kaspersky Lab, touches on various aspects of cyber security in enterprises and provides practical opportunities to test environments, as well as identify new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors in the infrastructure.
It is organised in partnership with Chinese company Keen Cloud Tech, and the finals will be held on 24 October at the GeekPWN conference in Shanghai, China. Kaspersky will cover the travel expenses of the finalists.
Prior to announcements of finalists, remote or virtual qualifying rounds will be held from 6 to 8 October, when participants will be required to resolve different types of cyber security tasks focusing on cryptography, reverse engineering, Pwn (video gaming), Web and networking.
"We are glad to partner with Kaspersky Lab and host the Industrial CTF together with the GeekPwn hacking contest in Shanghai. It provides us with a great opportunity to connect the top security researchers from all over the world, as well as to extend influence from smart life security to smart industrial security," says Daniel Wang, CEO of Keen and founder of GeekPwn.
More than 300 white hat hackers have already participated at previous competitions. Last year's participants successfully hacked and disrupted the model of an energy system build at the micro grid infrastructure in less than 24 hours, says Kaspersky.
Share