cyber patriot deadline

[johnnyb47]

Based on our experience last year the 24 hour window is as follows:
Target download becomes available Friday evening. Instructions with passwords become available the next morning at 10 am est which is the actual start of the competition. Scoring stops at 6pm est. So it isn't a full 24 hours. Just 6 for the round with the image becoming available the night before.

[Extremepredjudice]

Besides, how do you think IT security professionals keep sharp? They "battle" each other.

Incorrect, my padawan learner.

IT security professionals maintain technical expertise by examining attack vectors from logs obtained in the course of running a honeypot. Nobody with a real reputation to maintain "battles" with other professionals.

There is also a lot more to IT security than protecting against DDoS attacks.

//10+ years as an IT security professional
///For a medium-sized financial institution, not a non-profit who couldn't afford to hire me

I worked for a for-profit company that has over 20 million users, and 60 million hits a day. They were idiots(I am being nice just calling them idiots, trust me[even if you think I am insane on everything else, they really are idiots]. They fired their dev staff to hire more marketing consultants, then wonder why there isn't any development on the client. That is one incident)

Yes, there is more to IT that DDoSing, but it is a good thing to learn. I can't really hack myself(and defend at the same time), other than using scripts or injections.

I know security professionals that do battle each other, it gives them experience, and lets them know how quickly they can react.

[a2capt]

I gather that once the practice session closes, this test target image will no longer get to the desktop, so the only practicing is setting up our own images? Like I can setup some out of the box Win2K images?

[johnnyb47]

You'll still be able to login to the test target but the scoring engine on the SAIC's servers will be off. As long as you've set the password to something you remember on the target you should be fine.