Cyber Range:
Operation Par00t (Hacking a Physical Control Network)

Friday 13th April - Packet Hacking Village

CTF competitions focus on single result objectives or stand-alone technical skills and exploitation techniques. They seldom offer a chance to practice real world scenario based or business focused penetration testing, which usually incorporates consecutive security testing or a chain of successive attack vectors, in addition to a myriad of peripheral or overarching factors such as intelligence gathering, scope constraints, business logic, human psychology, safety concerns and competing technologies. This is especially true for operational technology or cyber physical networks, where hacking workshops exclusively focus on field devices or endpoint equipment (without the context of real world network environment or business context) and training laboratories or simulation environments are too expensive or just not available for practice and training.

Leveraging components from Context's in-house labs and incorporating lessons learnt from notes in the field penetration testing and red team engagements across both IT and OT networks, we would like to present an event that provides such an opportunity for the security community at BSides Canberra. It is unrealistic to expect a full-fledged penetration test or red team experience over a half day or one day event, but we hope to offer a chance for both rookies and experts to get their hands dirty with some scenario based hacking experience on a purpose built enterprise network. Not to mention- the end goal of the competition is to compromise an electronic physical control system for a remote control drone, and the first team (or individual) to control the drone gets to walk away with a real life Bebop 2 Parrot Drone!

Rules of Engagement:
  • Teams can have maximum 4 members (including Team Leader)
  • Each participant or team that takes part in the event will be provided with means to connect to the environment through OpenVPN, but own laptop is required.
  • Each participant or team will then proceed to attack the systems and network part of the scenario using whatever tools or scripts they have at their disposal.
  • Denial of service (DOS) attacks against the online infrastructure or other participants is strictly prohibited and will lead to immediate disqualification of the team.
  • Disruptive or offensive actions towards any of the other participants will not be tolerated and will result in the disqualification of the participant (and team if member of a team).


Shishir Gupta
Shishir is a lead consultant at Context Information Security with 8+ years of experience performing penetration testing and red team attack simulation engagements spanning four different continents. In particular, Shishir specialises in operational technology and industrial network security assessments, and has successfully led penetration testing for multiple industrial operations across the globe, across different critical infrastructure organisations (Power Transmission, Public Transportation, Industrial Manufacturing, Rail Transportation, Air Transportation, Resource Mining and Building Automation).
Connor Scott
Connor is a lead consultant at Context Information Security with 8+ years of experience in the security industry. He enjoys hacking things and cutting code. Connor specialises in software development, reverse -engineering and software exploitation. He spends most of his work time leading Red Teams, Infrastructure testing and Code/Application Reviews. He spends much of his own time hacking out of date software and hardware no one uses or cares about anymore. He once campaigned (unsuccessfully) to have this event named ‘Pwn2Dr0wn’.
Gerard Kelso
Kelso is an IT Consultant at Context Information Security and has had over 15 years of experience working in and around systems and servers spanning most of Australia. In particular he's worked in development, automation and maintaining many different network for a variety of needs. Ranging from Schools and family restaurants to international Engineering Companies and various Managed Server Providers. He's now starting to look into the IT security realm and is avidly studying and learning everything he can get his hands on.