AWD Attack-and-Defense System
A live adversarial system: teams attack opposing services to capture flags while patching their own vulnerabilities to keep services running.
An adversarial system that mirrors real operations
AWD (Attack With Defense) requires teams to hold their own services while attacking everyone else, making it the competition format closest to real security work.
Attack and defense skills, exercised together
The value of AWD comes from making every team play both roles in the same event.
Offense
- Find exploitable flaws in opposing services under time pressure
- Build and execute a working exploitation chain
- Analyze attack paths and assess blast radius
- Keep scoring as the pace of the round shifts
Defense
- Keep your own services available for the full event
- Locate and patch your own vulnerabilities quickly
- Spot incoming attacks and respond in time
- Judge risk and decide under sustained pressure
Core capabilities
Everything the AWD format needs to run end to end.
Target environment management
Container-based bulk creation of per-team targets, with reset and snapshot recovery.
- Bulk creation and handout
- Isolated runtime
- One-click reset
Service health checks
Each round polls every team's service availability, and downtime feeds straight into the score.
- Scheduled health checks
- Availability scoring
- Downtime alerts
Offense and defense scoring
Attack points and defense points are calculated independently, giving a complete picture of performance.
- Points for successful attacks
- Points for service uptime
- Per-round score tracking
Where AWD fits
AWD works well as a selection or assessment round, and asks more of participants technically.
University team training
Regular team practice and the final round of an annual campus contest.
- Team training camps
- Campus contest finals
- Inter-university matches
Enterprise drills
Test the security team's detection, response and remediation capability.
- Security team drills
- Incident response practice
- Annual capability review
Competition finals
Used as the final round of a regional skills competition to identify strong engineers.
- Regional competition finals
- Industry skills contests
- Identifying senior engineers
Take a closer look at the AWD system
Tell us your event size and environment requirements, and we will arrange a demo and deployment guidance.
- Containerized, isolated target environments with bulk creation and reset
- Independent attack and defense scoring for a complete picture
- On-premise deployment with event data stored locally
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