Between 3 and 6 September, Team France has been preparing for the European Cybersecurity Challenge that will take place in Bucharest. ANSSI has teamed up with the IRTSystemX to welcome players and their coaches on the Saclay campus and offer them a varied training plan. On the program: courses in cryptology, forensics, machine learning, Web CTFapplications and oral presentations of test resolutions.
Coming from different backgrounds, the ten regular players, along with their four substitutes, benefited from a one-week training. The objectives were twofold:
- get to know each other and start working together, within the team but also with the coaches they can rely on at the venue;
- get in the conditions of the European cybersecurity challenge (ECSC) by studying the types of challenges that they might be facing and by carrying out exercises that are most adapted to solve those challenges as efficiently as possible.
The ANSSI coaches and the research engineers of IRT SystemX’s “digital security” team joined forces and skills to make up a tailor-made preparation programme. In concrete terms, the training took place in two parts. The first component offered skills upgrading and development sessions on techniques and methodologies for discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities.
The second part was a situation simulation close to reality through a game of “ethical hacking” of the CTF (Capture The Flag) type. In this exercise, the members of Team France slipped into the clothes of a listener and used the same tools and techniques, in order to discover a maximum of vulnerabilities. Each vulnerability, associated with a mission, is identified by a flag symbolising the reward linked to its exploitation. The objective was to develop the best strategy, making the best use of the diverse and complementary expertise of each member of the team, in order to achieve the greatest number of missions.
