The Hacker Factor Blog

The Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center (DC3) has posted the scores of their 3rd annual Forensic Challenge.

As I had previously mentioned, the puzzles this year were tiered. There were 15 real-world problems divided among four difficulty levels. Level 1 were relatively easy problems, while Level 4 bordered on insanely complex. (I actually thought some of the level 3 were harder than level 4, but that just goes with my skill set.)

199 teams entered the challenge this year, and 20 turned in solutions. As Ron McGill said to me, "Looks like 20 teams submitted out of 199, so I finished in the top 10%..."

This year's big winner? "F0g D0gs" -- a two-man group starring Chris Eagle (Associate Chairman, Computer Science Department, Naval Postgraduate School) and Tim Vidas (Research Associate, Computer Science Department, Naval Postgraduate School). These same two guys spoke at Black Hat 2008 in Las Vegas on collaborative reverse engineering. A serious congratulations to these guys for winning the forensic challenge; they get major bragging rights.

Second place went to AWGN -- the Air Force Communications Agency. This team came in 4th place last year, so they moved up two positions.

Third place went to... Hacker Factor! (That's me!) So far, I am the only team to place in the top five all three years. I was also the only individual in the top 5 (as DarkFlib remarked, it took groups of people to beat my score). Finally, although one academic and one military group had higher scores, I beat out all other groups, including every government and commercial team. I also had a faster turnaround time; 55 days faster than the 1st place winner. (I actually spent about 2 weeks on the entire challenge, but it was spread over 147 days.)

Rounding out the top five are NSSAL and Cyber Lissard at 4th and 5th place, respectively. Both of these were academic teams.

The DC3's results page lists all 20 teams, affiliations, scores, and even the number of days it took them to turn in their solutions.

For the last two years I had higher scores than every government and military team. So, last March I challenged all military and government teams to beat whatever score I got. AWGN was the only group to step up to the challenge -- congratulations to them. I barely missed 2nd place by 39 points: AWGN had 2388 compared to my 2349 (less than 2% difference in scores). In contrast F0g D0gs had 2601 and 4th place had 2276.

At CISCON this year, I talked a guy (he goes by the nick "factor" -- unrelated to Hacker Factor) into doing the challenge. He only spent 8 days on it, and managed to come in 12th! (That's awesome!) He sorted the scores by points-per-day and pointed out that, based on points per day, he actually won! (He averaged 140.6 points per day.) Ironically, even using this scoring method, I still came in 3rd (averaging 15.979 points per day). The mode rate was an average of 12 points per day.