Competition Strategy

Competition Strategy

1. Document everything that you get points for. Not only can you keep these notes for future competitions and use it to help others learn, but it is a fail safe in case something happens and you need to restart the image over from scratch.
2. Take screenshots of your scoring report as you go. Similar to above, these can help to reconstruct an image if you need to restart over from scratch. They will also be analyzed after the competition in order to help others figure out what they may have missed points on.
3. Begin with the forensic questions. This is because subsequent action that you take on the image could change the answers you would get for these questions by removing or modifying files that are needed to answer the question.
4. Run the updates. Updates can take a while to download and running these up front saves time and allows you to continue working while updates are running in the background.
5. Use your scripts. Not every team will have scripts prepared, but these will get you easy points relatively quickly.
6. Use the checklists. This will be your guide to getting points. Skip the checklists and you're likely leaving points on the board.
7. Use Netstat. The netstat command will show you if there are unauthorized applications or backdoors running on the system.
8. Check your system clock. We have seen instances where the host system's clock was wrong and the team using it was penalized points as incorrect times violate the CyberPatriot rules. Make sure your time is right before you click start.