Otaku

Wargame for experts

One of the biggest barriers to protecting cyber-physical systems is that experts are usually trained only for traditional office environments. The number of attacks carried out in cyber-physical environments is on the rise though and they can have devastating impact. Otaku is a spectacular training program to prepare participants for the realities of cyber-physical systems, thus helping to solve the worldwide shortage in IT security staff and skills.

Is this training for you?

Training details

The setup

Otaku is a complex environment that models both the physical and digital elements of a manufacturing process. Physical parts: factory floor with conveyor belts, automated robotic arms, PLC and status indicators. Digital parts: different servers, webpage, databases, firewalls, workstation. the systems contain strategically located vulnerabilities.

The goal of a session

During the training, two teams compete against each other per table, the goal is to exploit vulnerabilities in the opponent’s system, penetrate the team’s defenses and disable the PLC and with that, the whole factory. In the meantime, each team has to defend their own system.

Main content elements

Forensics (mostly network), linux operation, network operation and security, web security, basic privilege escalation and lateral movement techniques. The default training program consists of 7 levels (attack and defence together) with a time limit of 8 hours.

Trainers and trainees

Trainers: Depending on the participants' background, we provide one mentor per table to help with the work. All tutors have market experience in the field. Trainees: Up to 10 teams can compete at 5 tables, a team can consist of 2-4 people. Preliminary qualifications: basic programming or networking experience is useful, for at least one person per team. The most to learn from this training are those who work in IT, but not in IT or OT security. In our previous trainings we have had students with business background (but only in interdisiplinary teams).

Duration

A training session is minimum of 1 day of lectures (concepts, tools, instruments) and 1 day of exercises. This can be extended to the needs of the participants.