Website Security for Competitions

Date: Spring 26
Event: Cyber Defense and Response Unit Competition Team Workshop

Slides

Github

Summary

CDRU competed in CCDC (Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) a few weeks before. We did well, but did not qualify for CCDC regionals. I was assigned two webservers, both running a LAMP stack. I did well keeping good uptime on these websites and servers, as well as preventing attackers from getting into these two vms.

The intent behind this presentation / workshop demo was to give the rest of the competitive team skills to defend the webservers for next year’s CCDC (and was a fun excuse to design my own CCDC environemnt).

The original environment was architected in a proxmox vm, that was then cloned and distributed to participants. One really cool thing I did was I included an attacker VM on the same subnet as all of the defenders. I then wrote a few hundred line long bash script that launched synchronous attacks against the participants - including a dashboard that listed every VM and whether the attacks succeeded or not against it.