On a chilly winter’s night in Perth, a handful of our local security practitioners met to discuss how we might build a cyber security challenge (capture the flag competition) for WA. Most of the attendees have worked as members of Perth’s booming security community over a decade, and have all seen first-hand how brilliant talent is often forced to leave the state due to the lack of demand for their specialist skills. The intent of the competition is to do something radical to show off our local talent and showcase to industry that they should be clambering over each other to get access to it rather than seeing it head over east or offshore.
From the outset, the team agreed on the following key outcomes:
- Bring together like minded people with an interest in cyber security to test and develop their skills against real-world cyber security challenges;
- Showcase this talent to local industry; and
- Uplift the profile of cyber security in WA, both locally and nationally.
As a group, we also wanted to demonstrate that our organisations, who often compete for local business, can collaborate to deliver something that benefits everyone. Perth’s cyber security industry is quite unique since we have an incredibly strong sense of community and desire to collaborate, even though we often compete for work. With cyber security collaboration as a key theme being promoted across Australia (it’s AISA theme for this year’s conferences), the timing could not be better.
The group agreed that four local security consultancies would fund WACTF:
- Hivint;
- Asterisk Information Security;
- Kinetic IT; and
- Diamond Cyber.
Host One has agreed to host the challenge environment and more than a dozen security practitioners, from a variety of backgrounds (web development, forensics, cryptographic systems design, systems administration, penetration testing, etc.) will build the challenges…Click HERE to read full article.
