Review of SANS FOR 508 & Winning the CTF Coin

So, just before the end of a remarkably interesting and odd 2020 year. I decided to go ahead and take the FOR 508 class on Advanced Incident Response, Threat Hunting, and Digital Forensics. I felt this was a course that could really benefit security practitioners for understanding best practices & methods related to IR. As well as, learning new techniques for threat hunting in a large enterprise environment. I decided to put up a post listing our what you can plan to learn from this course should you decide to take it.

Winning the Coin

One of the coolest parts of the class is Day 6 (more details listed later). You get a chance to join into teams and compete in a class APT Threat group challenge. The team that wins the CTF gets an award in the sign of a special course specific SANS Coin. On top of that, SANS will add your name to the Community DFIR Coin holders list! It is a great achievement, and I have to say the challenge was very realistic and fun to tackle.

SANS 542 – Winning the CTF Event – Coinage

SANS 542 – Winning the CTF Event

I just finished taking the SANS 542 vLive class on Web Application Penetration testing. During the last week (week 6) of the course, we have a CTF (Capture The Flag) event, where you team up with other classmates to exploit systems in a special SANS virtualized environment.

In our event, it started off being a bit unfair where the team I was on had 1 other person with me. While, the team on the other end had 4 members, so it was a 4 vs. 2 battle for most of the CTF. SANS has a similar environment as to one you would see at SANS Netwars. There is an area to create a team name, see your team rank and scores, as well as questions that are asked to you.

In the event our team thepentestninjas won the event leading the other team by over 100 points. We compromised all of the servers on the network, and completed the Level 3 mark. We however, got the very last system with 1 minute to spare.

SANS now has started a new program where they give out special SANS coins to winners of these types of events.

What is a SANS Pentest Coin?

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