Getting Started

The Cyberwildcats is a University Club that provides students with hands-on Information Security experience in a live network through realistic combat situations. The core activity of the club is Capture the Flag, where students actively practice offensive and defensive skills in a live-fire environment. Exercises are conducted around twice a month.

The club also has several Special Interest Groups to help students learn and practice InfoSec skills between CTFs. Each activity is primarily self-driven, with a mailing list dedicated to it for students to collaborate and coaches to assist with direction and problems.

Help to build and configure the CTF environment. Learn to install the systems and software used in the Cyberwildcats Capture the Flag events, from servers to firewalls, from desktops to intrusion detection systems.

Cyberwildcats Github Team for CTF Builders

Cyberwildcats Slack channel for CTF Builders

A cornerstone of security modern computer networks is threat hunting, the act of searching through logs and other instrumentation for evidence of adversary activity. Participate in activities to gain the hands-on knowledge needed to find malicious actors who have penetrated and are operating within secured systems for unsavory purposes.

Cyberwildcats Github Team for Threat Hunting

Cyberwildcats Slack channel for Threat Hunting

Learn the tools and techniques used to compromise systems in Capture the Flag. Learn how to break in, escalate, backdoor, pivot, and ultimately win via exfiltration.

Cyberwildcats Github Team for Red Cell Fu

Cyberwildcats Slack channel for Redcell Fu

Learn by building tools for use by others in the club, be it the other Specials programs or Capture The Flag. Write scripts, compile code, and solve problems with the help and guidance of the WilmU coaching staff.

Cyberwildcats Github Team for The Forge

Cyberwildcats Slack channel for The Forge

The Cyberwildcats has a vast amount of resources available for students to learn, practice, and build their skills to make them more able to find good work in the Cyber Security field. To start with, you will need to get accounts on the following sites:

Just fill out the Cyberwildcats Application Form!

Start using Slack

After you apply and are accepted, the University Club Faculty Advisor will add you to the Cyberwildcats Slack. You should receive an email with the invitation, which will have

Please be sure to create your account from the invitation as soon as possible and review what channels are of interest to you. Most communications between club meetings and events occurs on Slack, the site allows the club to stay in touch and share information in near-real-time.

Slack Mobile Applications

Slack also has an application for both Android and Apple IOS. You are strongly recommended to load the app on their phone and configure it to push notifications to you. This will help keep you engaged with the Cyberwildcats Community.

What will I need?

While the Cyberwildcats provides club members many resources for free, there is a minimal amount of equipment that students will need to provide for themselves.

A Laptop

Though not a requirement, students would be greatly benefited by obtaining a quality laptop for daily use, not just in club activities, but also in their other studies at the University and beyond.

A personal laptop allows the student to always have the software ready that is needed to participate in club activities. To advance in your knowledge more readily, it’s important to have a good platform that is customized to your preferences and needs.

While higher quality often comes with higher prices, you don’t need to break the bank by purchasing a top of the line unit. So long as a few bare minimum statistics are met, any laptop should suffice.

Memory

Any laptop you buy should have a minimum of 8GB of RAM. You will almost certainly want to run virtualization software on your machine, so that you can run multiple operating systems concurrently. Running virtual machines is extremely RAM intensive, as each install tends to need a minimum of 2GB to 4GB of memory for themselves.

The more RAM the better, but 8GB as a minimum should be sufficient.

Disk

While disks are often fairly large on most modern systems, a bare minimum will be needed for dual boot and/or virtualization. 400GB is probably a sufficient minimum for most cases. More will always be better, of course.

Students should beware of solid state drives. While very fast, these drives tend to be much smaller in storage capacity by comparison to spinning platters of equivalent prices.

CPU

Most modern CPUs are sufficient for participating in Cyberwildcats activities, though students may want to consider purchasing a laptop with built in virtualization in the chips. Of course, the more powerful the chip, the more horsepower you will have for running virtual machines while using your laptop, etc.

Base operating system(s)

Windows laptops tend to be more affordable than a Mac. If you purchase a Windows laptop, we strongly recommend that you install Linux as a dual-boot option. Ubuntu Desktop has a very robust installation process that will almost certainly preserve your existing Windows installation, though it will reduce the amount of disk available to that installation.

Users of Mac will do just fine, since it is a BSD UNIX variant. For Linux and Mac installations, the user is strongly recommended to install Virtual Box and then install a Window Desktop virtual machine.

Software

The student will need the following software to participate in most club activities. These packages do not come standard on University computers, which is one of the reasons a personal laptop is a must.

OpenVPN

Per the section about VPN access above, you’ll need to install OpenVPN software on your machine. The University Faculty Advisor will send you an email with instructions on how to obtain the software.

SSH client

Accessing many of the systems in the Cyberwildcats private network requires using SSH. Linux and OSX both ship with standard SSH clients, while PuTTY is the preferred solution for Windows.

RDP client

To access Windows systems in the Cyberwildcats private networks, an RDP client will mostly be needed. Windows ships with a standard, called mstsc. Linux and OSX both have many different versions that can be easily installed from application repositories and/or the app store.