CYBERTOWN STEAM SOFTWARE

On the CyberForce Slack channel for competitors, threat intel overwhelmed with gossip and meme noise. The log info came at us in an unending stream. I stared at the big screens, looking for rogue logins. We were double their age and had ten times more experience than they did. Somehow that didn't make us feel any more confident about our chances of winning.

CYBERTOWN STEAM SOFTWARE

Our team's average age was 42, and together the six of us have a combined 107 years of experience working in IT, including a couple of folks from the defense sector, a software architect, a systems integrator, an early Facebook employee, and a coder turned wordslinger-me. The other three teams at Berkeley Lab were undergraduates, most of them too young to enjoy a beer after. 'They're all just kids,' we muttered, glancing sideways at each other. We sat down at our battle stations-two giant big screens propped up on our competition table-and prepared to defend. We were not warriors going into battle we were lab mice in a maze with hawks circling, predators ready to crush us with their talons at any moment. The music still rings in my ear, so wrong in retrospect. Our ad hoc SOC: six laptops, two big screens, many coffees. Then 'The Anvil of Crom' thumping in the car, Nathan our mentor driving, up the rainy black hillside to the unclassified cliffside lab that overlooks campus, to the guard post, documents glanced at, a flicker at us in the back seat, then up, up, up to the SOC we had laid out on two tables the day before. My teammate Josh rocked up with a coffee and we stood watching the rain. for the competitors at Brookhaven on Long Island, 10 a.m.

Doors opened at 6:30, and the competition began at 8 a.m. I sipped my black coffee and checked my phone: 6:12.

This wasn't your normal capture the flag (CTF), where teams competed to break into the systems and steal information. We weren't just sitting ducks, we were Peking ducks ready to serve with plum sauce. How were we going to defend these completely defenseless industrial control systems? These things were running modbus, insecure by design. The piranha in my bowels gnawed away at my spasming entrails. I stood in the dark under the dripping canopy of the Strada Cafe in Berkeley waiting for my ride to the lab that morning. 'Let me check something.' Predator and prey Teammate Daren tugged at his grey goatee. For eight hours we fought to keep our systems up and red team out, until, by the end, the uncontrollable twitch in my right eye told me I had chewed on too much stress for one day. The six of us hunched over our laptops in the competition space at Berkeley Lab, perched cliffside just east of the UC Berkeley campus, too distracted to enjoy the view of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay and the iconic Berkeley Campanile, the picture postcard bell tower. I was not only reporting on the event, I was playing to win. We were the UC Berkeley team representing the Berkeley iSchool's new Masters of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS, pronounced 'mikes') program, and I was not only reporting on the event, I was playing to win. The DoE runs its CyberForce competition every year to introduce college cybersecurity students to the challenges of securing critical energy infrastructure, and to recruit the best and brightest.

CyberForce - a competition to defend critical infrastructureДЄcross the country in seven different Department of Energy labs, university teams fought alongside us to defend identical infrastructure. Meet Big Oil Logistics and Transportation Corporation (BOLT Corp), its ICS, and an HPC running on four Raspberry Pis. What is going on?'ДЇour Raspberry Pis running the oil refinery and HPC sat on the table in front of us, water pumps clicking on and off. Our blue team was tasked with defending a mock oil refinery's industrial control system (ICS), the HPC and the integrated back-office IT system-all of it default insecure, some of it insecure by design-and the only real defense active monitoring and split-second eviction before red team could take us down. We'd hoped to evade their talons, but they wasted no time, and now one of our critical assets blinked out-a meal for a hungry predator. They'd been scanning and probing all day Friday, but weren't allowed to attack until the checkered flag dropped Saturday morning at 8 a.m. Red team had been circling since the day before, hawks swooping and diving. 'Get it up! Get it up! We're losing points!' Our high-performance computing cluster (HPC) blinked red on the big screen.

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