grey h@t - academic year 2012-2013 recap

GREY H@T AT GEORGIA TECH

Academic Year 2012-2013

Getting ready for 2012-2013

Where did we start?

Grey H@t founded in Fall 2011. Andy Davis, Chris Julian, Mykal Thomas

and Tim Swihart were admins, all of which are very hard to find pictures of!

Built us up off the ground, got the group organized, and had an awesome first year!

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Jack Morgan – Competition Admin

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Alex Bires – Lab Admin

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Torry LaMay – Communications Admin

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Eric Zhang – Web Admin

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Nick Johnson – Technical Admin

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013

Chris Grayson - President

Getting Ready for Fall!

We left Spring 2012 with close to no online presence.

Over the summer all of the admins put in work to put a more organized face together for Grey H@t.

We did all sorts of crazy things like…

Made a Logo!

Put Up Forums!

Put Up a Wiki!

Put Up The Rest Of Our Site!

Made Flyers For Recruiting!

Decided On Our Mission!

Learn the skills required to break things and the ethics necessary to wield them

properly

Cleaned Up / Set Up Our Lab! Received TONS of surplused equipment,

sorted through all the gear we had, kept what we wanted, and cleaned / organized the lab in CCB 335!

Cleaned Up / Set Up Our Lab!

Fall 2012

Fall’s Focus

Grey H@t was not as organized as we wanted it to be and as such organization was a big focus of the Fall.

We wanted to start networking with industry professionals.

We wanted to attend and compete in competitions to spread our name.

We wanted to get infrastructure up and running so that we could host our own CTF-style exercises.

We wanted to have weekly meetings where people could exercise their CTF skills (lab meetings).

We Did Some Recruiting…

And we started with a bang! We were not at FASET but we were at

other new CoC student events and we got quite a bit of attention.

Our first meeting had an attendance of over 125!

We amped everybody up for the semester and spoke about what could be expected.

Starting With a Bang!

Starting With a Bang!

Hungry Hungry Hackers

Our first competition of the semester was Hungry Hungry Hackers put on by GTRI!

We ROCKED – out of the top 16 spots we held at least 10 of them.

A very strong way to start the semester >:)

Hungry Hungry Hackers

Weekly Meetings

We had a large number of external people come in and talk to us about all of the cool stuff you can do in the information security industry.

We also had a bunch of Grey H@t members give presentations that they put together themselves.

All-in-all, lots of great material was discussed during our weekly meetings.

Fall 2012 External Speakers

Paul Royal

Tom Cross

Chris Silvers

Labs

Nick, Alex, and Jack all worked very hard to bring educational exercises to us in labs.

For those of you that had the pleasure of attending the music-playing lab, I’m sure you have quite pleasant memories of “My Little Pony” and “Friday” ;)

SkyDogCon and Duplicity CTF Some Grey H@tters packed their bags

and headed to Nashville, TN to cut their teeth at the Duplicity CTF!

There were a ton of great talks at SkyDogCon.

We had three separate teams competing in the Duplicity CTF and we got 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place!

SkyDogCon and Duplicity CTF

SkyDogCon and Duplicity CTF

CSAW CTF

The Mad H@tters competed in the CSAW CTF and kicked all sorts of ass.

As can be seen here (https://csawctf.poly.edu/scoreboard/?l=q) the Mad H@tters got third place, behind only Carnegie Melon University and United States Air Force Academy

The End of Fall 2012

We had a ton of great things happen during this past Fall.

Some of the feedback we heard suggested that our talks focus more on using tools than showing off the industry.

Wanted to continue improving on our competitive edge – iCTF was scheduled for mid-Spring.

The other admins and myself were very proud of our members and organization.

Spring 2013

Spring’s Focus

As per feedback received during the Fall, tried to have our talks center more around tools than theories and industry.

We had so much great material during the Fall that went undocumented that we started the initiative to record all lectures.

Wanted to have labs more available to the public – anybody could come in and ask any questions they wanted.

Big focus on doing everything we could to ensure an easy transition to the succeeding administrative panel.

Meeting Repository Set Up!

We started recording talks and putting resources up on our site for archival purposes.

Labs

We thought that one of the reasons that people get discouraged with this field is due to its complexity.

As such we held weekly labs where anyone could come in and just ask questions that they had trouble with.

Thus, we provided the resources for anyone to learn whatever they want about the infosec field.

Weekly Meetings

While we didn’t have as many external organizations come in and give presentations as we did in the Fall, the curriculum of Spring’s meetings was outstanding.

Presenters included Nick Johnson, Alex Bires, Jack Morgan, Robert Grosse, Torry LaMay, Eric Zhang, and Chris Grayson.

Topics Covered

Windows exploitation development, thick clients with thin security, Nmap, DNS cache poisoning, social engineer’s toolkit, XSS, tunneling and key management with SSH, WPScan, SSH, Paros, and Wireshark

Spring 2013 External Speakers

UCSB iCTF

This was the big competition! 98 teams from around the world

competing on one day for over eight hours.

Ended up getting 24 out of 98 overall, but also got 6th out of the 36 American teams.

We beat Air Force >:) http://www.ictf2013.net/scoreboard_publi

c

UCSB iCTF

UCSB iCTF

Elections For 2013-2014

We changed the administrative layout slightly, going from the six admin positions we had for 2012-2013 to the following: President Communications Admin Web Admin Competition Admin Technical Admin

Administrative Panel for 2013-2014

Kennon Bittick – Competition Admin

Administrative Panel for 2013-2014

Jake Miller – Technical Admin

Administrative Panel for 2013-2014

Jillian Cagliostro – Web Admin

Administrative Panel for 2013-2014

Eric Zhang – Communications Admin

Administrative Panel for 2013-2014

Nick Johnson - President

The End of Spring 2013

The conclusion of what turned out to be one hell of an academic year for us!

Recorded many of our presentations and have successfully started an archive of all projects and presentations moving forward.

Moving forward

The New Administrative Panel Is nothing short of extraordinary. As much progress as we have made over

the past year, I expect as much if not more to be made in the following year.

We’re starting to have veterans in administrative positions ;)

Things To Look For

The Grey H@t cloud – our own OpenStack instance being put up by Nick and Jake

Funding sources – Grey H@t has established itself as a great organization, now it’s time to get companies to start giving us some $$! We can get servers, con tickets, etc etc.

Improving our competitive edge – we went from nobodies to beating Air Force in less than a year – just imagine where we’ll be a year from now.

Bylaws – we need an official outline of our organization and how we operate.

Continued networking – we’re getting our name out there and we’re only going to continue doing so!

Places We Can Improve

Attendance – we had an incredible attendance at the beginning of the fall and attendance numbers steadily declined until now.

Reaching out – while we had two separate recruiting events in the Fall and Spring, additional effort could be made to get the word out about Grey H@t on a regular basis.

Entertaining all levels of experience – having talks and demonstrations that are understandable and interesting to all levels of experience is difficult to achieve but is also a necessity.

A Personal Note

Quickly, what Grey H@t means to me and the community as a whole.

Have a GREAT Summer!