GLACY+ Project participated in the organization of the 4th Digital Security Challenge 2020 (12-16 October) hosted by INTERPOL in cooperation with its private industry partner NEC and Cyber Defense Institute. A total of 100 participating cybercrime and digital forensics experts from 50 countries were assigned into 10 teams and competed to win the challenge.

During the four-day event including the challenges and training sessions, the participants tackled a complicated cybercrime case to produce investigative leads, exercised their knowledge of reverse engineering, programming and digital forensics and learned and shared knowledge through the review sessions at the end of each day.

The marathon-like competition lasted for 96 hours from Monday 12 October at 6pm Singapore Time. When the first set of challenge was released, the 10 teams formed communication channel and worked day and night to find the hidden flags. They were given 23 hours before the next stage begins.

This year’s challenge had a scenario of BEC sphere phishing by highly sophisticated crime group. The first 24 hours began with the email artifacts found in the computers of the victim and ended with decompiling the retrieved malware artifact (Stage 1). Then the investigation developed as the malware revealed the whereabouts of the command and control server. Police retrieved the stolen data and could identify other victims (Stage 2). As the money transfer was suspended, the criminal group launched revenge campaign by attacking police network with phishing email and trying to film police activities with drones. One of the drones was captured, which revealed the location of the hideout of the criminals (Stage 3). The criminals quickly fled, but police could collect some encrypted data. By cracking the data, and by analyzing infected police computer, the investigating team successfully thwarted the criminal group (Stage 4).

All 10 teams competed neck-to-neck until the final stage. The champion of the competition was earned by the Team D from Botswana, Canada, Iceland, Jordan, and Vietnam. The team collected 4470 points in total to become the champion.

• According to the final results, the GLACY+ countries turned out to have performed extremely well in the challenge, the Top 10 most active countries (out of 50 countries) being the following: Lebanon, Brazil, Dominican Republic, South Korea, Macau, Benin, Belgium, Canada, Nigeria and Costa Rica.
• Ghana and Sri Lanka contributed in Team C’s earning the 2nd place in the competition.
• The best individual performer was awarded to Mr. Carlos LEONARDO from Dominican Republic with highest individual score of 3350. Teamed with Mr. Adilson RODRIGUES from Cabo Verde, he carried the Team F on the 3rd place.

The capture-the-flag (CTF) competition such as Digital Security Challenge is new and novel approach for cybercrime and electronic evidence training for the most advanced experts. GLACY+ project will continue to support and provide more CTF activities in the future.

INTERPOL news: https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2020/Rising-to-meet-the-INTERPOL-Digital-Security-Challenge