End of an Era

Recently the Recon team had to make the tough decision to take a step back from running our larger OpenSOC CTF events. It was not an easy decision as we know how much impact this project has made on the information security industry since we ran the very first public event at DakotaCon in 2018. Since then, the project grew larger and further than we ever dreamed, eventually becoming a DEF CON Black Badge contest in 2019 (on the DC site, too!) and running at multiple incredible conferences across the US.

It’s that time of year again - DEF CON! We were thrilled to run OpenSOC again at DEF CON this year, even if it had to be virtual (fingers crossed we’re all in person again in 2022).

We can't start a recap post without a huge THANK YOU to the community for joining us last week and making SOC X such a success!

Some of you may remember our last event, Camp COVID. That was the biggest event we had ever run.

UNTIL LAST WEEK: DEF CON 28

Let me first say, on behalf of the Recon team, we cannot thank the community enough for joining us last week.

Hello OpenSOC fam! First and most importantly, we hope that you and yours are healthy and happy in these unprecedented times.

After DEF CON last year, we posted this blog about our infrastructure, which was spread between a handful of Intel NUCs, and AWS. It was epic. It was shiny and new. We loved it.

We never wrote up a blog post for DC27, but this excerpt from the closing ceremonies covers most of what we would've written.

When I joined the OpenSOC team at the beginning of this year, everything resided on 3 Intel Skull Canyon NUC's, a couple other systems for scenarios or applications with hardware requirements, a Ubiquiti WAP, a Synology NAS, and various other things.