Test your defensive and offensive skills in the eCSI Hacker Playground

BalaBit and Silent Signal today announced that registration is now open for the eCSI Hacker Playground. The hacker challenge is a global online competition, specially designed for the Black Hat USA 2015 conference in Las Vegas. The competition starts at 12:00 am PT on July 31 and lasts until 12:00 am on August 9.

The game is available globally for penetration testers, IT security experts, and all candidates who like challenging themselves and would like to learn more about vulnerabilities based on real-life examples.

Black Hat USA 2015 conference participants can receive on-site technical support at booth #566 during the exhibition days, August 5-6. eCSI Hacker Playground participants will be challenged with legally committing an eCrime within the framework of the competition to see how successfully they can cover their tracks.

Most existing hacking methods and tools are accepted for use, and winners will be chosen based on their speed in getting to the highest privilege level. Special awards are also available for the Best Backdoor solution and National Heroes – those completing the challenge within their native country.

”While carefully designing the architecture of the increasingly sophisticated levels of the eCSI Hacker Playground, we used real-life examples and cleverly spiced them up. Those who register and try to solve the challenges of four different levels can be sure that they would also survive in such a situation when doing their everyday job,” added Bálint Varga-Perke, IT security expert and co-owner of Silent Signal.

Players completing all the levels of the eCSI Hacker Playground training will learn skills that will be able to prevent outside attackers from infiltrating corporate users to gain privileged access – which could lead to dire consequences. That is why the organizers are looking for freelance hackers to participate in this training. The eCSI Hacker Playground consists of several different levels, ranging from easy to quite challenging.

“We see that the most costly cyber attacks are the result of privileged account misuse. Our aim is to train the good guys to protect against the latest, trickiest attacks connected to privileged rights escalation. Security experts that are trained in our hacker playground, however, will know how to act to prevent all of this and can also help us to develop better solutions against future security threats” said Péter Höltzl, senior IT security consultant at BalaBit.

Prizes include:

• The prize for the first place is to travel and participate at Black Hat Europe 2015 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
• The second best wins a 64GB iPad Air 2, the third a Lego Mindstorms EV3 31313.
• Award for the best backdoor solution is a MacBook Air.
• National Heroes – players who reach the highest score first in their respective county – will also be awarded with a special certificate. In certain countries, National Heroes will win an admission ticket to one of the biggest IT Security festivals in Eastern Europe, Hacktivity and accommodation during the conference.