Staff And Exec News
By: Lambda CinC Enstyne and Lambda ViceCinC FriSp
Staff and Exec for quite some time have been striving with the community to rebuild and improve the CyberArmy back to something we all can be very proud of.
It was felt within the community that we needed to get back to our grass roots and provide incentive and structured learning based around security. To fully achieve this goal some quite complicated and time consuming challenges lay ahead of us, not just in the coding of back end and front end changes but also in the planning and structuring with emphasis on as little impact to our current site. To date not all of these hurdles have been overcome but we are pleased to announce that some significant steps have been made.
The Windstone API is now fully integrated into the site allowing CyberArmy to reach out to a wider audience. Currently ca-zeb has been linked in, and OSI is working towards linking their challenges and editorial submissions into the accomplishments system.
Accomplishments is all but complete allowing CyberArmy to award badges via Windstone for the completion of challenges based out with the traditional CyberArmy community.
A number of bug fixes which were long over due have now been completed and will be released soon. Anyone interested in these bug fixes can view them here http://haileris.dyndns.org/~ens/bugtrack this site is linked into CyberArmy via the Windstone API.
The next stages include :
- Development of a task/points system.
- New mini challenge levels.
We have managed to achieve this with a very small team of people and I’m sure you will all join me in thanking them for all the effort put in to date because just like everyone else they have real lives too!
Ideally we need more people to help in driving CyberArmy forward so any one with even the smallest amount of time to spare can contact either Enstyne or FriSp who will be only too happy to put your valuable time to good use.
The Way Forward
It has for sometime been recognised that for CyberArmy to survive we need to reach out and retain the members who join for Sered. Why do they join play Sered for a week or so and then never return? A lot of arguments can be put forward for this but the overriding one seems to be that they enjoy the challenges because they wish “to be a hacker” Traditionally no help has been given within Sered to aid and develop their skills thus they find it too difficult and never return. Now the plan will not be to help members with Sered rather to make available to them some “real world” experience in security design and methodology utilising purpose built exploitable environments and guidance. We currently have one site close to completion and hope to include others shortly.
We also hope to spread the word about CyberArmy and let people out there know we are still around and to this end Enstyne has agreed to utilise some of his annual leave from work and will be attending this years HAR2009 in Amsterdam. This we hope to repeat at some if not all of the other conventions over the coming months. Anybody who is planning on attending any of the conventions please let either Enstyne or FriSp know.
The important thing is to keep focus together we CAN strive forward and once again be a community to be proud of.
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