I recently participated in GET SET HACK by RISE a 5 day cybersecurity hackathon organized in partnership with ThriveDX SaaS and secured AIR 90 in it. In this blog, I have shared my experience of participating in the hackathon.
GET SET HACK by RISE was a 5 day cybersecurity hackathon organized to spread awareness about the critical need of cybersecurity experts in the industry and ways to build successful career in it.
The schedule of the hackathon was as follows:
(21st August) - Screening Test & Webinar: Recorded Webinar with ThriveDX SaaS
(23rd August) - Webinar: Intro To Cybersecurity & Web application Penetration
(23rd August - 25th August) - Self-study on Cryptography
(25th August) - Webinar: Classic Ciphers and Encoding
(28th August) - The Final Challenge
Day 1 (First Webinar & Screening Test):
The day 1 of the hackathon started with a webinar on Forensics: Hiding Data in Unsuspecting Files by Kar Wei Loh, Cybersecurity Instructor, ThriveDX SaaS followed by a screening test to select participants for the final hackathon.
In the webinar, we were taught about meta data, hiding secret messages in image files, audio files and office files. We were also taught about the various tools like OpenStego and Audacity which can be used to retrieve hidden files from the image files and audio files respectively.
The screening test was based on the webinar Forensics: Hiding Data in Unsuspecting Files and some general cybersecurity questions. After this screening round, top 1000 participants were selected out of 22,000 participants.
Day 2 ( Second Webinar):
On the day 2 of the hackathon, another webinar on Intro To Cybersecurity & Web application Penetration by Ron Breger, Cybersecurity Instructor, ThriveDX SaaS was organized for the selected participants to prepare them for the final challenge.
In this webinar we were taught about various types of cyber crimes, vulnerabilities and exploits. We were also taught about the different types of web-based attacks and web app pentesting tools.
Day 3 (Self-study on Cryptography):
On the day 3 of the hackathon, the selected participants were given a self learning module to be completed on the ThriveDX SaaS platform.
The self study module covered encryption and decryption in detail.
Day 4 (Third Webinar):
A webinar on Classic Ciphers and Encoding by Ron Breger, Cybersecurity Instructor, ThriveDX SaaS was organized for the selected participants which was also the last webinar conducted before the final challenge.
The final webinar concluded with the learnings of Classic Ciphers like Caesar Cipher, Playfair Cipher and Atbash Cipher.
Day 5 (The Final Challenge):
The final challenge comprised of a case study that we needed to solve in 4 hours to get the final clues of the challenge.
In this challenge we had to use the techniques taught to us in the webinars and self learning module.
We were given 7 questions( 6 mandatory questions and 1 bonus question) whose answers were hidden in the final challenge files. I had to use Base 64 to ASCII conversion and some classic ciphers like Caesar Cipher, Playfair Cipher and Vigenere Cipher to find the answers of the mandatory question.
The bonus question was a tricky question in which we first had to ensemble some images to form a QR Code which contained the link of the document needed to reach the final answer. The document contained text written in Pikalang and some numbers that needed to be decoded to reach the final clue. The final clue gave the values of latitude and longitude of the location, which was the correct answer.
The level of difficulty increased with every question and so, did the excitement to solve the mystery and reach the final answers.
My Views about the Hackathon:
The hackathon was completely different from the hackathons that I had participated in. The concept of teaching the topics first, that will be used to solve the challenge was something new that is not found in many hackathons.
I really liked the hackathon and had an amazing experience solving the final challenge.
Banner and Image Credits:
RISE Instagram @risewpuofficial
GIF Credits: