The Incident Response Challenge 2020 — Win $5,000 Prize!

Cybersecurity firm Cynet today announced the launch of a first
of its kind challenge to enable Incident Response professionals to
test their skills with 25 forensic challenges that were built by
top researchers and analysts.

The challenge is available on https://incident-response-challenge.com/^[1]
and is open to anyone willing to test his or her investigation
skills, between April 21st and May 15th.

What’s more interesting is that there’s a USD 5000 prize for the
first-place winner of the challenge.

Forensic investigation is at the core of any IR processes and
provides the critical path from the initial stage of suspicion or
limited attack view to the concrete and actionable knowledge on the
attack’s root cause and the impact that is essential for recovery
and restore operations.

The challenge of the incident responder is to identify and
collect the scattered traces the attackers have left them and
connect the dots to understand the how, what, and where of the
attacks.

As cyberattacks increase in scope and sophistication, the skills
of IR professionals are rapidly rising in demand. This demand is,
in fact, so high that there is a severe global shortage in such
professionals.

This is in part due to the proliferation of attacks but also to
the fact that forensic investigation is more of fine art than a
commoditized line of trade, and both talent and creativity play a
significant role in building a high edge incident responder.

The 25 IR Challenges

An example of one challenge

The Incident Response Challenge is built and designed with
precisely these talent and creativity in mind. It includes 25
challenges in increasing difficulty level, all inspired from
real-life scenarios that compel the participant to go beyond the
textbook solution and think outside of the box.

These are the Incident Response Challenge terms and conditions:

• Sign up as a participant in the Incident Response Challenge
  website^[2].
• Start solving the challenges – each challenge comprises a
  story, question, and files to download and examine to answer
  it.
• Time matters! The scoring algorithm calculates a score based on
  the number of correct answers and the time it took to solve each
  question.
• The score is made known to the participant after completing all
  25 challenges.
• You are limited to one entry. Anyone who enters more than once
  will be disqualified.
• The winner will be announced 72 hours after the competition
  closes on May 15th.

Are you a hands-on forensic researcher, SOC analyst, or malware
analyzer? Go to https://incident-response-challenge.com/^[3], get your hands dirty,
and beat your peers to get the first prize!