The Hack the Port Academic Village will consist of onsite and virtual opportunities for participants to exercise their cyber defensive and offensive skills. The goal is to elucidate the skills needed to understand how industrial control systems are used in a maritime context as part of the national critical infrastructure landscape, but also to inform and exercise the skills of participants using Internet of Things (IoT), information technology systems and software that also connect to industrial control systems.
The plan for the village includes a variety of cyber physical stations that can be used to test skills and understand up close how various industrial control systems and related technologies work.
The village will consist of a multi segmented network that will include various maritime operational technology assets and scenarios, as well as IT and IoT.
Who can participate in the academic village:
- Students enrolled in a US Cyber Command academic engagement college or university.
- Students enrolled in a Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Community college or university.
- Students enrolled at a senior military college.
- Students who attend other DoD or service academies
- Students not part of any of the above programs can still participate and register a team if we have space onsite, and we can accommodate the virtual participants after we seat the participants from the above list.
Cyber Exercise Team structure, logistics and guidelines:
Each college or university can field a team of 5 participants onsite and a team of 5 offsite participants. The off-site participants can act as open source intelligence gathering and support for the onsite teams but can also engage certain targets that are part of the exercise that are internet facing.
Each team will receive access to the cyber exercise playbook to be published to the event website. Each team will be required to attend a virtual cyber exercise orientation session with MISI and its technical team prior to the date of the cyber exercise start, March 22-March 25, 2022.
The date and time of the virtual session will be announced to registered and approved teams via email.
All onsite teams must be at the Greater Fort Lauderdale / Broward County Convention Center, located at 1950 Eisenhower Blvd, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316
Phone: (954) 765-5900 no later than 12 noon, Monday, March 22, 2022.
The host hotel offering discounts for conference attendees is the: The Ft. Lauderdale Hilton Marina, Address: 1881 SE 17th St, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316
Registration links to the hotel discount site for the event are available at: www.hacktheport.tech
Teams can arrive earlier Monday, March 21, 2022, to participate in conference lectures, training and networking events. On Monday teams will pick up their team badges, and related conference materials. At the convention center there will be a clearly marked area for all academic teams to verify their registration and get any new updates for the academic village.
Each team will receive a team badge granting access to the Academic Village.
Each team will be directed to their team area on the competition floor.
Each team will bring their own laptops and related equipment needed to participate in the cyber competition.
Cyber Exercise Phases:
Phase I will require the college teams to compete and achieve the highest scores by successfully achieving the goals for each target in the exercise.
There will be three winning teams based on the team scores. The teams will then pick members of their team’s that will become red team members for phase II of the exercise.
In phase II the selected red team members will be pitted against a blue team consisting of cyber professionals from the military, civilian agencies and industry.
The blue team may return offensive cyber-attacks against the red team members.
The phase II exercise will result in one winner based on their ability to successfully defend and defeat the red team or the red team’s ability to successfully attack and take down the maritime, industrial control, IT and IoT targets.
Virtual team participation logistics
MISI DreamPort will provide a VPN connection into the exercise for virtual team members provided to MISI DreamPort by Lumens.
Each college can field a virtual team of 5 remote participants. The maximum virtual participants is 50 for the academic village. Essentially, we can support 10 teams of 5 each for a total of 50 remote participants.
When reviewing the playbook what we have learned from prior exercises is that the offsite team members can help accelerate target penetration by assisting with finding vulnerabilities, product manuals, in the wild exploits and other open source data. But as stated with the VPN connection the remote team can assist in the CTF.
Academic attendees not participating as an active member of a competing team
Attendees not members of the competition team on site can attend as spectators and participate in mini cyber subject matter expert boot camps, conference lectures and keynote addresses and other learning activities. The same applies to non-participating members of college teams that are virtual.
Spectators must not cross into the designated areas of opposing teams and must remain in the spectator section.
Live Streaming and Play by Play
The competition will be streamed online to registered attendees and conducted in a gaming style atmosphere with video cameras, sound and lighting and event narrators broadcasting the play-by-play aspects of the cyber exercise to spectators at the event and online.
Cyber Challenge Problem
Students not participating in the cyber exercise can field a team or participate as individuals in the Rossum’s Robot Signatureless ICS anomaly detection US Cyber Command Challenge. Details for the Rossum’s Robot challenge are on the event website at www.hacktheport.tech