250 security professionals from Ukraine competed in the SANS Institute’s latest Grid NetWars competition.
Cybersecurity professionals from across Ukraine took part in a large-scale cyberattack simulation that echoed the devastating real-world strike on Ukraine’s power infrastructure in 2015.
With 250 participants, 49 teams battled – either digitally or in person at a Kiev venue – to earn points by remediating an attack against a fictional energy provider after it had multiple unexpected system failures.
Security professionals from Ukraine’s public and private sectors and higher education institutions, worked for five and a half hours to determine the nature of a malicious network penetration before expelling the intruder and restoring systems to normal operation.
The winning team was Berezha Security Group from Kiev, and cybersecurity engineer Dmitry Korzhevin was the best-performing individual participant.
The competition, which took place on December 2, was the latest Grid NetWars tournament hosted by SANS Institute, a US infosec training body, with previous tournaments held in Singapore, India, Japan, and Australia.
The event was also coordinated by Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection, and the US Agency for International Development’s Cybersecurity Critical Infrastructure project (USAID).
Real Time Scenario
Ihor Malchenyuk, Head of Cybersecurity Regulatory Assistance and Institutional Development at the USAID Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure in Ukraine project, said “Every day 560,000 new malicious programs are detected in the world, therefore it is necessary to constantly improve qualifications and ‘pump’ the skills of cybersecurity specialists,”
“Such competitions as Grid NetWars provide an opportunity to practice not only the knowledge and skills of each specialist separately but also train joint interaction,” he added. “After all, the training conditions are as close to reality as possible.”
With the support of two additional US-based infosec experts, Tim Conway, Technical Director of the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) programs at SANS, mentored event participants.