http://www.independent.com/news/2007/dec/08/ucsb-hosts-largest-computer-hacking-competition-ev/ By Matt Kettmann December 8, 2007 The world’s largest computer hacking competition ever went down at UCSB on Friday, December 7, with 35 teams from nine countries logging in from their home bases and trying to take down each other’s mock websites. Hosted by UCSB’s Department of Computer Science — where the event’s founder and coordinator Giovanni Vigna runs one of the more respected computer security programs in the world — it was the sixth time the International Capture the Flag (iCTF) battle had been waged in five years. "This is the biggest hacking competition ever," said Vigna. "You can bet on that." By the time the dust settled on the all-day event, a team from Milan, Italy called the Chocolate Makers emerged victorious, but only after facing tough competition from Russians, Germans, Americans, Argentines, Austrians, Australians, Indians, and the French. (See the winner announcement here and final scores here.) The online war works as follows: Vigna and his upper level graduated students create a mock website with a half dozen section pages. In the morning, every team is given the same website, and must begin analyzing the structure immediately. Within minutes, they are blocking the websites security holes while other team members — typically teams have around 20 students on them — begin attacking the other websites’ section pages. The scoring system, which is technically a secret for fear of being hacked, allocates points for both successful attacks (where a flag is captured) and defenses. This year, it also gave points for answering questions about computer security, which ranged from programming techniques to humorous trivia. That trivia system was actually hacked this year, apparently accidentally, by the team WCSC from the University of South Florida in Tampa, scoring them 35,000 points in one swoop. That gave them a huge bump in the battle's last hour, putting them briefly in first place. But they ended up finishing fifth overall. [...] __________________________________________________________________ Visit InfoSec News http://www.infosecnews.org/
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