The U.S. Cyber Challenge-sponsored Cyber Quests are a series of fun but challenging online competitions allowing participants to demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of information security realms. Each quest features an artifact for analysis, along with a series of quiz questions. Some quests focus on a potentially vulnerable sample web server as the artifact, challenging participants to identify its flaws using vulnerability analysis skills. Other quests are focused around forensic analysis, packet capture analysis, and more. The quests have varying levels of difficulty and complexity, with some quests geared toward beginners, while others include more intermediate and ultimately advanced material.

Cyber Quest is designed to identify individuals with an interest and talent in security. The challenge covers a broad array of different topics to assess experience and breadth of knowledge. In particular, this challenge focuses on infrastructure security. You will be asked to identify security issues in common daemons and typical networks as well as demonstrate the thought process of a penetration tester.

You are not restricted in the tools used to play this game, however it is suggested that, at the minimum, you may wish to prepare a copy of Aircrack-ng, Wireshark (or an equivalent like TCPDump to your preference), and the ability to decode base64 and decode/run PHP.

Registered Cyber Quest users will each have three attempts to take the quiz. For each of your three attempts, you will have 24 hours from the time you begin the quiz to complete it, and you may only submit your answers once per attempt. For each attempt, if you do not submit the answers within 24 hours of when you start, or by 11:59pm EDT on April 30, 2012 (whichever comes first), you will receive a zero score for that attempt. Winners will be determined based on who achieves the highest score in the shortest amount of time. In the event of a tie score, the shortest time is the winner.