About guardians

The Guardians is a blue-team capture the flag (CTF) online competition, where you can test your skills in Digital Forensics, Incident response and Threat Hunting. But Guardians is not just a game. It’s a set of challenges designed to help those interested in IT security to learn and test their practical DFIR skills in an environment that resembles a real enterprise network. Our virtual enterprise has all what real enterprise has – servers (Domain controllers, MS Exchange, fileserver, webserver, …), firewalls, IDS, log management or workstations. Simulated users send emails, surf the Internet and use internal resources. And as many enterprises, it is the constant target for hackers. The attacks are prepared in cooperation with professional penetration testers and based on real methods used by APT groups. Players don’t need to have any special tools installed to play, any modern web browser will do the job.

Partners

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The Mission

Despite the tremendously increasing number of cyber-attack reports, cybersecurity is still an underestimated and underfunded department in many companies. The mission of Guardians is to raise general awareness of cybercrime and its negative impact on all aspects of society.

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WHY SHOULD YOU JOIN?

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Therefore, we believe that continuous education of the general public and young, as well as seasoned security experts, is the most efficient way to increase the defense capabilities of the entire society.

By choosing this topic, we want to contribute to the protection of values that represent the society in which we all live, and the Freedom of the press is one of its pillars. Besides testing the preparedness of the Slovak and Czech incident response teams, the goal is to increase the defense capabilities of journalists themselves.

Support this endeavour by sending your team or join as a partner.

  • Test your incident response team’s preparedness and skills
  • Increase the trust in your brand by demonstrating your commitment to the cybersecurity
  • Build relationships and share industry experience with other participants and partners
  • Get media exposure and attract new cyber talents
  • Contribute to the safer business and public environment

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Previous rounds

2021: “FREEDOM OF THE PRESS” – malicious private and nation-state actors trying to hijack control over one of the pillars of modern democracy – media..

2020: “VACCINE RESEARCH” – with the world rushing to develop a vaccine, attackers were trying to hijack sensitive information and intellectual property.

2019: “PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION” – in the run-up to the presidential election in Slovakia, the scenario featured state-sponsored hackers targeting a presidential candidate’s staff to influence the elections.

2018: “HOSPITAL UNDER ATTACK” – a simulated attack in a hospital environment targeted patients’ health records, the hospital’s website, and smart-building technology.

2017: “NUCLEAR POWERPLANT DISASTER” – the simulation of an attack targeted the power generator of a nuclear power plant based on December 2015 events in Ukraine.

Guardians summarised
5
Years of Guardians
98 %
Positive feedback
636
Active participants
30000 +
Submitted answers
Participants Experience
David K.SOC Manager at MSSP

Guardians 2020

It was great CTF, the difficulty was just right for intermediate analyst, but there were also tasks that were challenging, in a good way, even for experienced analysts.

AnonymousGuardians player

Guardians 2020

Sure, this was the best CTF I played this year

AnonymousGuardians player

Guardians 2020

My first ctf ever. I liked the real world scenarios and that I learned things, I would never have stumbled upon. The support from you guys was great.

SpyroNow works as SOC Analyst at Binary Confidence

Guardians 2019

This was my second year as a guardian and especially final rounds are always positivelly unforgetable!
Guardians taught me a lot of new valuable skills. Thank you!

ABOUT THE FOUNDING PARTNER

BINARY CONFIDENCE

Guardians are organized by Binary Confidence – an elite provider of managed security services founded by seasoned professionals from Enterprise IT Security, Intelligence agencies, Ethical hacking and Cybercrime investigation environments. Binary Confidence provides end-to-end cybersecurity services in IT security governance, 24/7 security monitoring, CSIRT, vulnerability management, and custom IT security solutions.

The Guardians event brings know-how and experience from similar prestigious international competitions where Binary Confidence regularly ranks in top positions with the most recent grab of 2nd place at the g DEFCON 2022 OpenSOC competition.



Binary Confidence

Špitálska 53, 81101 Bratislava
+421 2 321 999 80
guardians@binconf.com