Cynet announced the company's IR Challenge for incident response professionals. The first-place winner of the contest will receive a $5,000 prize as the contest qualifies the investigative capabilities of participants against a set of challenges designed by top IR experts. The Cynet IR Challenge is open now and can be accessed at https://incident-response-challenge.com/. The contest will remain open until May 15th, 2020.
With the launch of this challenge, Cynet has assembled the top analysts and researchers to build out the challenges in this IR contest and ensure that solving the presented problems will strain the skills of even the most experienced responders. The main guideline in the IR Challenge is that the tests reflect real life scenarios rather than artificial mind drills. In light of that, the team has reviewed a large number of documented investigations to distill a total of 28 patterns, starting from easy and becoming progressively more difficult as the IR professional proceeds.
Incident response (IR) is a methodical approach to orchestrating and managing the response after a cyberattack or other security breach. The objective is to confidently manage the situation in a way that reduces damage and limits recovery time and costs. Prominent to this process is the ability to conduct a forensic investigation across the attacked environment in order to form a clear understanding of the incident's root cause, attack vectors and overall impact. The challenge also tests for IR investigative strengths of participating individuals, allowing them to measure and sharpen their skill set.
"While Capture the Flag challenges that test hacking capabilities are common, there has never been a publicly available test for IR related forensic investigation," said Dori Harpaz, VP, Marketing, Cynet. "In the course of this timeframe anyone can try their hand, starting from the first and proceeding to the other increasingly difficult IR challenges. We welcome all participants and will reward the most accomplished with a financial prize, recognition and a certificate of completion."
Success in the IR Challenge will be based on the results as well as the time it took the contestant to solve. At the end of the two-week contest period, a winner will be declared and the results of the challenge will become available. The Cynet IR Challenge questionnaire will remain online afterward as a free resource for IR practitioners.
To participate in the IR Challenge, please register for free at https://incident-response-challenge.com/.