We were walking across the contest area, and we see this massive display.
And it is so cool. I wanted to find out, what is this? Where are we right now?
All right, great. So what we are doing here is we are running a CTF. This is the Red Alert ICS CTF.
And this basically, we have a ton of toys here for people to come in,
hack, play, and learn a lot of things. So this is a purely ICS-based CTF.
And all the toys that you have here are all hackable.
So this is all industrial control systems.
So what type of attacks are needed here, like protocol fuzzing and things like that?
A little bit of everything, actually.
So if you're looking at probably the city right here, you can fuzz a blackout.
You can have a man-in-the-middle attack, do an MITM, cause a blackout probably.
Play around with the runway, cause some sort of an airport crash.
And all of these things are all interactable. You can interact with all of these things.
You actually can, yeah.
And when you run the attack, lights will turn off or whatnot.
What about some of the stuff over here?
So what you see here, this one and this particular one,
these are two units or simulations of units that you see at nuclear facilities.
So this is something that's known as a spent fuel pool cooling system,
which is used to cool nuclear fuel.
And that one that you see right there is actually a centrifuge.
So these are things that you would ideally find at nuclear facilities.
Now you have a ton of teams here competing.
How many teams do you have?
Actually, we've got teams coming in and going, but we've got a good number so far.
It's a good turnout.
Now, it looks like you have a bunch of different manufacturers here.
Are these published vulnerabilities that the teams are going out and finding,
or are they actually having to reverse engineer and look at some of the protocols?
Can you walk me through a standard attack path one of the teams might have to use?
So it depends on the kind of challenge that you're doing.
The different manufacturers that you see here,
we just want to show that there are attacks possible and we are vendor neutral.
So you can attack any of them because there are tons of protocols here as well.
We've got the S7 complex that's proprietary to Siemens.
We've got Modbus, DNP3, so on and so forth.
And for a traditional attack, one of the challenges they would have to come in,
we do give them the CVE IDs as well.
And they can follow that, do a little bit of research, a little bit of digging in,
and they're good to go.
So let's go from start to finish because that's what I'm curious about.
I want to sit down and actually hack away on this thing.
Do I need special hardware or anything like that for this?
So all you need to do is just come in with your laptops.
If there are challenges that require specialized toolkits, we'll be providing them.
We've got a ton of these toolkits, ton of these things here, ton of these toys.
So what's in the standard toolkit?
So let's take a look, shall we?
Yeah, absolutely.
So this is one of those toolkits that we give to the players.
So we've got a hack RF to play with the radio frequency kind of attacks.
The crane that you see there is controlled by radio frequency, actually.
Yeah, let's go check out this crane.
This is one of my favorite ones I've come across so far.
So if you send an attack in here, it will actually flip it around and move.
So the players will actually be able to take control of the crane.
I'm worried this guy might be a little too close,
might take out a laptop in the process.
So let's go back over to the kit.
So you have a hack RF.
Right.
What else is in here? What's the red alert?
This is actually an RTL-SDR that works similar to a hack RF.
We've got a Raspberry Pi here for one of the other attacks that we're required to do.
And we've got a tiny little Team Z board here as well.
Oh yeah, to simulate a keyboard.
Yeah, so a lot of things going on, a ton of challenges. That's what it is.
This is so cool.
What is the coolest thing you've seen a team do so far here?
Yesterday, one of the teams were actually successful in causing a blackout.
So they were able to cause a citywide blackout, take down the city.
That's so cool. Can you give me an idea of what they did?
Like, was it they had to flip a bit? Was it that they just DOSed it?
They were actually able to... they had to remotely connect to the HMI there, the controls.
So the HMI actually deals with the PLC.
HMI, Human Machine Interface.
And the PLC is there that actually controls this particular portion of the city.
And they were able to just rig their way in and take control of it.
And after they get into the PLC, did they have to inject new functionality?
Or was this functionality already there?
Once they got in, they could just turn it off.
For this particular one, this was already there.
To get there is probably the challenging part.
And we've just got one team so far that has managed to do it.
And that's not just guessing a password or something like that.
No, it's not. It's a lot more than that.
Can you walk me through a little bit of that step?
Actually, it goes down to the protocol level of information that you have.
So it could be... I wouldn't want to say a lot of things about it.
Because there are people still playing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Give out any of the spoilers.
But everything requires a different approach.
A lot of digging in that's required.
But for each of the challenges, we've given them ample information, ample description.
So if they do a little bit of digging in, they'd be able to get their way through it.
Is this only for experts?
Or can you be a beginner and plug in and start figuring it out?
You can be a beginner and just come in as well.
So the point here is to have some fun, right?
Yep.
Go back with probably a lot more than you came with.
So learn a little bit.
So if you're a beginner, if you're an absolute beginner, you can still come in.
Try out a few challenges, probably the easier ones.
And then, yeah.
Excellent.
Hey, thank you so much.
Thanks.
Is there somewhere online where the team can either interact with us
or even after the contest, is there a place where they can learn more about these techniques?
We actually do a lot of these things.
Last DEF CON as well, when it was completely online, we had the same kind of setup.
We had similar setups, similar challenges, all online.
And this is what we're showing on the screen here.
So DEF CON 29 had the challenges running here, actually.
Excellent.
Oh, that is so cool.
This has to be one of the coolest displays.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Thank you for watching.
And as always, hack on!