Kaspersky Lab brings together whitehats from across the world; to test security of a virtual oil refinery

Kaspersky Lab on Wednesday announced the international industrial Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition, offering participants the opportunity to hack a model of a real production site facility in an oil refinery. Finals will be held in Shanghai on October 24.

The CTF is a unique challenge, which touches on various aspects of cyber-security in enterprises and provides practical opportunities to test environments, as well as identify new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors in the infrastructure. This worldwide information security contest is especially beneficial for industries such as energy, gas and oil and transportation - those industries with critical infrastructure which are essential to the functioning of societies and economies.

A successful attack on one of them could result in devastating damages and consequences. The CTF allows top security experts to research virtual pieces of industrial control systems, discovering unobvious security problems that can be avoided in the future.

Moreover, it gives enterprises an insight into different types of possible attacks on real parts of infrastructure, helping them to provide the maximum level of protection for their industrial networks against existing and future threats.

This year, teams participating in the Kaspersky Lab Industrial CTF will be challenged with tackling a miniature process model which replicates a real production-site facility at an oil refinery. The model represents a rail tank discharger rack, consisting of a variable speed centrifugal pump, storage tanks (reservoirs), a heat exchanger and a buffer tank. In addition, participants will have a chance to test their skills and knowledge of several IoT devices.

"The organization of such events is highly important to help develop understanding of the industrial threat landscape. At our CTF competitions, we offer participants the chance to hack models of real enterprises, therefore everything that happens at a CTF site can also happen to real critical infrastructure and industrial systems. So, it provides opportunities for security researchers, as well as ICS vendors and system integrators, to better understand how ICS systems work and improve their security," said senior security researcher Kaspersky Lab, Vladimir Dashchenko.

The industrial CTF 2017 is organized in partnership with Chinese company Keen Cloud Tech, and the finals will be held on October 24 at the GeekPWN conference in Shanghai, the world's first hacking contest.

"Kaspersky Lab is a world-leading cyber-security provider, and we are glad to partner with it and host the Industrial CTF together with GeekPwn hacking contest in Shanghai. It provides us with a great opportunity to connect the top security researchers from all over the world, as well as to extend influence from smart life security to smart industrial security," said CEO of Keen and founder of GeekPwn, Daniel Wang.

Prior to the finals, online qualifying rounds will be held on October 6-8, 2017. Participants will be asked to resolve different types of tasks such as Crypto, Reverse, Pwn, Web, Network and Fun.