Grey H@t - Academic Year 2012-2013 Recap

GREY H@T AT GEORGIA
TECH
Academic Year 2012-2013

Where did we start?
 Grey H@t founded in Fall 2011.
 Andy Davis, Chris Julian, Mykal Thomas and
Tim Swihart were admins, all of which are very
hard to find pictures of!
 Built us up off the ground, got the group
organized, and had an awesome first year!

Administrative Panel for 2012-2013
 Jack Morgan – Competition Admin

 Alex Bires – Lab Admin

 Torry LaMay – Communications Admin

 Eric Zhang – Web Admin

 Nick Johnson – Technical Admin

 Chris Grayson - President

Getting Ready for Fall!
 We left Spring 2012 with close to no online
presence.
 Over the summer all of the admins put in work
to put a more organized face together for Grey
H@t.
 We did all sorts of crazy things like…

Decided On Our Mission!
 Learn the skills required to break things and
the ethics necessary to wield them properly

Cleaned Up / Set Up Our Lab!
 Received TONS of surplused equipment,
sorted through all the gear we had, kept what
we wanted, and cleaned / organized the lab in
CCB 335!

Fall’s Focus
 Grey H@t was not as organized as we wanted it
to be and as such organization was a big focus of
the Fall.
 We wanted to start networking with industry
professionals.
 We wanted to attend and compete in competitions
to spread our name.
 We wanted to get infrastructure up and running so
that we could host our own CTF-style exercises.
 We wanted to have weekly meetings where
people could exercise their CTF skills (lab
meetings).

We Did Some Recruiting…
 And we started with a bang!
 We were not at FASET but we were at other
new CoC student events and we got quite a bit
of attention.
 Our first meeting had an attendance of over
125!
 We amped everybody up for the semester and
spoke about what could be expected.

Hungry Hungry Hackers
 Our first competition of the semester was
Hungry Hungry Hackers put on by GTRI!
 We ROCKED – out of the top 16 spots we held
at least 10 of them.
 A very strong way to start the semester >:)

Weekly Meetings
 We had a large number of external people
come in and talk to us about all of the cool
stuff you can do in the information security
industry.
 We also had a bunch of Grey H@t members
give presentations that they put together
themselves.
 All-in-all, lots of great material was discussed
during our weekly meetings.

Fall 2012 External Speakers
Paul Royal
Tom Cross
Chris Silvers

Labs
 Nick, Alex, and Jack all worked very hard to
bring educational exercises to us in labs.
 For those of you that had the pleasure of
attending the music-playing lab, I’m sure you
have quite pleasant memories of “My Little
Pony” and “Friday” ;)

SkyDogCon and Duplicity CTF
 Some Grey H@tters packed their bags and
headed to Nashville, TN to cut their teeth at
the Duplicity CTF!
 There were a ton of great talks at SkyDogCon.
 We had three separate teams competing in the
Duplicity CTF and we got 2nd, 3rd, and 4th
place!

CSAW CTF
 The Mad H@tters competed in the CSAW CTF
and kicked all sorts of ass.
 As can be seen here
(https://csawctf.poly.edu/scoreboard/?l=q) the
Mad H@tters got third place, behind only
Carnegie Melon University and United States
Air Force Academy

The End of Fall 2012
 We had a ton of great things happen during
this past Fall.
 Some of the feedback we heard suggested
that our talks focus more on using tools than
showing off the industry.
 Wanted to continue improving on our
competitive edge – iCTF was scheduled for
mid-Spring.
 The other admins and myself were very proud
of our members and organization.

Spring’s Focus
 As per feedback received during the Fall, tried to
have our talks center more around tools than
theories and industry.
 We had so much great material during the Fall
that went undocumented that we started the
initiative to record all lectures.
 Wanted to have labs more available to the public
– anybody could come in and ask any questions
they wanted.
 Big focus on doing everything we could to ensure
an easy transition to the succeeding
administrative panel.

Meeting Repository Set Up!
 We started recording talks and putting
resources up on our site for archival purposes.

Labs
 We thought that one of the reasons that
people get discouraged with this field is due to
its complexity.
 As such we held weekly labs where anyone
could come in and just ask questions that they
had trouble with.
 Thus, we provided the resources for anyone to
learn whatever they want about the infosec
field.

Weekly Meetings
 While we didn’t have as many external
organizations come in and give presentations
as we did in the Fall, the curriculum of Spring’s
meetings was outstanding.
 Presenters included Nick Johnson, Alex Bires,
Jack Morgan, Robert Grosse, Torry LaMay,
Eric Zhang, and Chris Grayson.

Topics Covered
 Windows exploitation development, thick
clients with thin security, Nmap, DNS cache
poisoning, social engineer’s toolkit, XSS,
tunneling and key management with SSH,
WPScan, SSH, Paros, and Wireshark

UCSB iCTF
 This was the big competition!
 98 teams from around the world competing on
one day for over eight hours.
 Ended up getting 24 out of 98 overall, but also
got 6th out of the 36 American teams.
 We beat Air Force >:)
 http://www.ictf2013.net/scoreboard_public

Elections For 2013-2014
 We changed the administrative layout slightly,
going from the six admin positions we had for
2012-2013 to the following:
 President
 Communications Admin
 Web Admin
 Competition Admin
 Technical Admin

 Kennon Bittick – Competition Admin

 Jake Miller – Technical Admin

 Jillian Cagliostro – Web Admin

 Eric Zhang – Communications Admin

 Nick Johnson - President

The End of Spring 2013
 The conclusion of what turned out to be one
hell of an academic year for us!
 Recorded many of our presentations and have
successfully started an archive of all projects
and presentations moving forward.

The New Administrative Panel
 Is nothing short of extraordinary.
 As much progress as we have made over the
past year, I expect as much if not more to be
made in the following year.
 We’re starting to have veterans in
administrative positions ;)

Things To Look For
 The Grey H@t cloud – our own OpenStack instance
being put up by Nick and Jake
 Funding sources – Grey H@t has established itself as
a great organization, now it’s time to get companies to
start giving us some $$! We can get servers, con
tickets, etc etc.
 Improving our competitive edge – we went from
nobodies to beating Air Force in less than a year – just
imagine where we’ll be a year from now.
 Bylaws – we need an official outline of our
organization and how we operate.
 Continued networking – we’re getting our name out
there and we’re only going to continue doing so!

Places We Can Improve
 Attendance – we had an incredible attendance at
the beginning of the fall and attendance numbers
steadily declined until now.
 Reaching out – while we had two separate
recruiting events in the Fall and Spring, additional
effort could be made to get the word out about
Grey H@t on a regular basis.
 Entertaining all levels of experience – having talks
and demonstrations that are understandable and
interesting to all levels of experience is difficult to
achieve but is also a necessity.

A Personal Note
 Quickly, what Grey H@t means to me and the
community as a whole.

Grey H@t - Academic Year 2012-2013 Recap

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