On October 15, 2011, the NCCDC organizers will be holding Panoply for the second year at the Airport Hilton. Panoply is an event that complements the NCCDC. The primary goal for teams is to obtain resources that reside in a virtual cloud and secure it from the other competitors while maintaining its functionality.
For example, Team A may discover a Virtual Machine that is running on a Windows 2003 platform and is configured to be a DNS server. Team A may use any legal strategy to gain access to the VM and input their unique team string. In this case, Team A must create a reverse lookup entry that responds to a DNS query with the IP address 1.1.1.1 with their team string corresponding to it. We would then do a lookup for the IP address 1.1.1.1. If the team is successful, the result should be as “Name: (Team A’s String) Address: 1.1.1.1″
More information about Panoply can be found here: http://www.cyberpanoply.com/
The first Panoply event was met with positive feedback. This year’s event will have close to 30 VMs. Along with the virtual targets, there will also be fun challenges where teams can compete for bonus points.
Although this might be considered the “fun” competition, it stresses several important factors that future IT professionals should know about: assessments, security, and maintaining critical services with minimum downtime.
