Article Details

Join in the festive cybersecurity fun. Get hands-on cybersecurity training this seasonal challenge. Sponsored Post Are you ready to pit your wits against the cyber exercises featured in the Holiday Hack Challenge 2024: Snow-maggedon? The seasonal 2024 SANS Holiday Hack  event will start on 7th November, offering a series of progressive gamified cyber challenges over the course of the next eight weeks. It's a new format this year, which starts a month earlier than usual to keep participants engaged, active, and learning over a longer period. The second, third and fourth segments of the challenge will be released on the 11th and 18th November, and 2nd December but you can enter the contest right up to the closing date on 3rd January. The SANS Holiday Hack Challenge is a great way for people that are already working in cyber security, or have ambitions to make a career out of it, to acquire skills which they can subsequently use in the real world to protect organisations from cyber attacks. Topics cover multiple cyber defence and offence disciplines, including ransomware reverse engineering, hardware hacking, mobile app penetration testing, and SIM/SIEM analysis. Video game hacking, web app hacking with MQTT, and video feed manipulation are also on the agenda, alongside threat hunting with KQL, OSINT via drone path analysis, and PowerShell for cyber defence. Each element of the challenge will offer both easy and hard modes to accommodate participants of different skill levels and abilities, and you can skip sections and come back to solve them later to advance the storyline. To whet the competitive appetite, participants will be able to track their progress on a live scoreboard. This year, participants can also create their own cohorts to measure how they do against people in their own organization or against their friends.  The winning entries also get top prizes, including access to a free SANS OnDemand cyber security course and a  subscription to the NetWars Continuous cyber range platform. More information about the 2024 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge can be found here and you can sign up to receive notifications on when the game begins and alerts for new challenge releases byclicking this link. Sponsored by SANS.