Last weekend I got to lead the Penn State Competitive Cyber Security Organization’s inaugural Red vs. Blue Competition, and it was incredible to see it finally come to life after months of work.
Since January #
Since January, I’d been working with a great group of people to design, build, and launch a pirate-themed cyber range that would challenge attackers and defenders in realistic ways. The environment spanned 29 machines across multiple operating systems — web servers, databases, and Active Directory domain controllers — built to replicate enterprise-level complexity while staying approachable for students. On competition day, over 40 people were involved between the red team, blue teams, orange team, and facilitators, making it one of the largest and most complex events CCSO has ever run.
My Role #
I served as lead administrator of the event and developer of the infrastructure — designing and deploying the environment, writing custom tooling and malware scripts to keep the red team’s attacks realistic, and coordinating the flow of the competition so everything ran on schedule. All told, this was hundreds of hours of development, prep, and teamwork before a single team ever touched a keyboard.
For four and a half hours, 32 students defended systems as blue teamers against live red team attackers, submitting incident response and inject reports along the way and briefing a simulated C-suite on the evolving situation. The red team worked to compromise machines, kill services, and simulate real adversary tradecraft; the blue teams raced to detect intrusions, patch holes, and get critical systems back up under pressure. The pirate theme made the whole thing more fun without taking anything away from how real the pressure felt in the room.
Crew #
- Red Team & environment development: Jonathan Skeete, Owen Dransfield, Asa Reynolds
- Blue Team leads: Aidan Ethier, Evan Glickman, Kekoa Merez
- Admin team: Isabella Masso, Aiden Johnson
- C-Suite: Nicklaus Giacobe, Matt Ruff
I’m incredibly grateful to have been part of pulling this off, and even more excited about what it set up — this event became the template for the second Red v. Blue Competition we ran the following spring, and for wherever we take it from here.