Incident Response Competition for Women

Retrospect Labs, A3C and the AWSN have partnered to provide the first competition style incident response exercise for women working in the sector across Australia. Use your technical and non-technical skills to work on a cyber incident scenario self-paced over one week. Register as a team and win a prize!

What is this?‍

Retrospect Labs, A3C and the AWSN have partnered to provide a competition style incident response exercise.

For one week, starting on the Wednesday 8th December 2021, participants will be provided with a scenario that simulates a real-world incident. The exercise will include forensic artefacts that participants have to analyse to understand what malicious activities have occurred and how the adversary undertook those activities (their TTPs used). Participants will have to undertake standard incident response activities, such as identifying IOCs, providing mitigation/remediation recommendations, and assisting media/legal teams.

Throughout the exercise, teams will submit certain tasks common to incident response activities. These tasks will be used by a panel of expert judges, who will evaluate the performance of each team during the event and based on the tasks they complete, and name a winner/s during the panel discussion at an event hosted at the A3C on Thursday the 15th December 2021.

Not only will the winning team earn the title 'Winner of the 2021 Incident Response Competition', but there are also some awesome prizes up for grabs!

When is it running?

Officially kicking off at 9am (ACDT), Wednesday 8th December 2021 and ending 17pm (ACDT), Wednesday 14th December 2021.

There will be an End of Competition Event hosted at the A3C in Adelaide on Thursday 15th December 2021 at 9am-1pm (ACDT).

Who's this for?

Any AWSN member and those identifying themselves as female are welcome to participate.

It would be beneficial to have some SOC/Incident Response skills (some familiarity with common incident response tools or incident response frameworks). However, you do not need to have these technical skills to participate in a team.

First time competitors can request for a mentor and in fact it would be advantageous to include those with legal, management and communications in your team!

Teams can comprise of one to five women.

Places are limited to 20 teams.

Registration

One person in your team should be nominated as the team captain. They must register their details, which will be passed onto Retrospect Labs for correspondence on next steps.

The cost is $20 per team, and this money will be donated to a charity or scholarship.

Please visit AWSN's event page to register.

What happens next?

Once registered, the team captain will sent an email requesting for details of the team members. The teams will then be given access to Retrospect Labs' cyber security exercise platform, named Gauntlet. Information (injects and forensic artefacts) will be distributed via Gauntlet.

What else do I need to know?

Participants will be able to control the pace of the exercise and will have the flexibility to compete outside of work hours. You can start the exercise whenever you like, work through it at your own pace – but everything must be completed by 14th December. Participants won't be judged on how long they take to complete the challenge.

Places are limited to 20 teams.

If you would like to participate but do not have a team, please contact AWSN and we will connect you with others who would like to form a team.

Out of respect for the organisers and the judges taking their time to run this competition, we would appreciate it if you let us know if you are no longer able to compete, by sending AWSN an email at least 48 hours beforehand. Thank-you.