BSides Iowa 2018: "Hacker for the Holidays"

BSides Iowa 2018 - Track 2 Speaker: Antoinette Stevens During Christmas, I decided to give the SANS Holiday Hack challenge another shot. In recent years I would start, become hopelessly overwhelmed and eventually give up, defeated. This time was different. Even though I started a little late, I made it further than I imagined and I’d like to share the new tricks I’ve picked up and a few things I’ve learned about how to get through some of these CTF-like challenges as a novice. During this talk, I’ll walk the audience through an overview of the SANS Holiday Hack (its rules and general information), the different types of challenges that they had this year and how I solved a few of them, and advice for anyone who would like to give it a shot in 2018. While the SANS Holiday Hack is the focal point of this talk, it will mainly focus on specific concepts and tools. For this talk, I will recreate some of the side challenges (cranpi challenges) that were used for this year’s Holiday Hack and walk through them. Technical topics covered during this talk include, linux command line utilities, sql basics, and basic networking. Soft skill topics include, communication skills and problem solving. This is the perfect talk for beginners who are interested in diving into penetration testing and online challenges.