The Standoff 15 international cyberbattle will take place at the Luzhniki sports complex during the Positive Hack Days cyberfestival on May 21–24. Over 40 teams of attackers and defenders from 15 countries across Europe, the CIS, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East will clash in a major cybersecurity showdown. The top red teams in this cyberbattle will split a $50,000 prize pool. Blue teams will investigate live hacker attacks and defend industries, putting their skills to the test in the real world.

Russia's Ministry of Digital Development is backing the Positive Hack Days cybersecurity festival. The City of Moscow is our strategic partner. This year's festival is powered by the Social Development Complex, the Department of Information Technology, and the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovative Development.

Cyberbattle participants will attack and defend the infrastructure of a virtual state. It covers seven key industries: metals, energy, oil and gas, banking, urban environment, aviation, and logistics. Each segment will have its own physical mockups and a revamped visualization system, so visitors can witness firsthand the fallout of successful attacks: streetlights going dark, flight delays, fuel shortages from a refinery meltdown, banking app crashes, even a steam turbine grinding to a halt at a power plant.

This year, we'll see locally customized Linux domains powering oil and energy infrastructure, while the banking sector will adopt domestic payment processing solutions, a versatile mobile authentication, and e-signature platform. Our digital government infrastructure includes over 600 software programs, hardware components, and devices. 

New techniques and monitoring of attacks

During May's cyberbattle, white hat hacker teams can try out new attack techniques. For example, bypassing two-factor authentication (TOTP/2FA), sneaking past Content Security Policy (CSP), exploiting buffer overflows in user services, tricking DNS caching (DNS Cache Deception), and remotely running code through Python Pickle Deserialization.

In total, the attackers will get the chance to trigger more than 120 critical events. Points will be awarded based on the complexity and success of the attacks.

Blue teams (cybersecurity pros) will defend industries in investigation or response mode. In the first case, their mission is to log as many incidents as possible and investigate the attacks. In response mode, the teams will be able to prevent and counter attacks to protect their sectors.

A global community of participants

Teams from 15 countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Tunisia, Oman, and the UAE, will clash at Standoff 15.

Over 30 red teams (ethical hackers) will be on the offensive. Some of them joined us after rocking our April qualifier. Over 40 teams battled it out over five days for just five spots in the cyberbattle finals. Others snagged their invites thanks to their performance in previous Standoffs (13 and 14) and two seasons of the International Cybersecurity Games. Plus, 10 professional pentesting teams, including Southeast Asia's top talent, joined us through a special international program.

There will be 13 blue teams participating in the event. Our judges, experts from both Standoff and ESC, will be keeping a close eye on the cyberbattle, making sure everyone plays fair and checking the reports from both the blue and red teams.

The cyberbattle Standoff 15 is teaming up with top Russian tech companies. Digital Solutions, a leading Russian developer and manufacturer of network security hardware, provides the building blocks for a rock-solid IT and cybersecurity infrastructure for your entire digital kingdom. At the banking industry mockup, software solutions will be presented by eKassir, a developer of software for banks and financial institutions, and SafeTech, a developer of innovative solutions for securing remote banking systems and electronic document management. The NTI Center at MPEI, a developer of smart grid protection, automation, and digital twin solutions, will deploy its services on the energy sector model.