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Team Communications - Why is Team communications so important? The Cyber Defense competition is a fast-paced exercise that can quickly become a very confusing environment. The first thing that the school should do is harden the assigned systems (servers, network devices and security systems) to reduce vulnerabilities that may exist. (Hardening systems will be one of the future Tips.) Typically, each student is assigned responsibility of one system, so they will all work individually to find and fix vulnerabilities on that system. If each student works quietly alone, then the discoveries that one student makes, does not benefit the Team. Instead, if a student let’s his/her teammates know vulnerabilities that they find, and how they fixed it, then others can quickly search to see if their system has a similar problem. This maximizes the collective effort of the Team.

Similarly, when a student notices unexpected traffic on the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) (using an IDS will be a future Tip), they should alert other teammates who may also notice a similar condition and they can work together to determine the cause and impact of that potential hacker activity. Or, it may be that one student notices unexpected traffic, while another student has one of their critical services go down (Maintaining Critical Services will be a future Tip), then they might correlate that these two conditions clearly identify that a hacker has gained access to a system and from where that hacking activity is coming. (Check me on this last statement)

Bottom-line, sharing information openly with your teammates will increase your potential for success. It only takes a few seconds to tell your teammates, and it may prove to be valuable to everyone. 

 

© 2009 The Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security