New Ethical Hacking Challenges Every Month

Scenario:

You are a security analyst for a leading cybersecurity firm investigating a critical incident involving a large financial corporation. The corporation recently suffered a sophisticated cyberattack that exploited vulnerabilities in one of its custom-built Windows applications. The attack has led to unauthorized data exfiltration, and the company’s systems are showing signs of compromise from unknown malware variants.

Your Mission:

An encrypted Windows application suspected of containing malicious code has been recovered from a compromised machine. Your first task is to reverse-engineer the application to identify the malware, understand its functionality, and uncover any backdoors or embedded payloads used to exfiltrate sensitive data.

While analyzing the reverse-engineered application, your team must also perform threat hunting across the company’s Windows-based infrastructure. The attackers have left traces in system logs, hidden processes, registry keys, and artifacts buried deep in memory. Your objective is to track the attacker’s movements, identify persistence mechanisms, and neutralize the threat.

Scenario:

You are a security analyst hired by a tech company, WebSec Solutions, which specializes in e-commerce platforms. Recently, they have suffered multiple security breaches due to various web application vulnerabilities, which have impacted their customer data and financial transactions.

Your Mission:

The company suspects that attackers are exploiting several vulnerabilities within their web applications and configurations. Your task is to assess their web infrastructure and uncover these vulnerabilities before malicious actors exploit them further.

You will investigate vulnerabilities aligned with the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Threats, including SQL injection, security misconfigurations, broken authentication, cross-site scripting, etc. Each challenge will simulate real-world attacks, and you’ll need to identify, exploit, and mitigate these vulnerabilities to strengthen WebSec Solutions’ defenses.

Scenario:

As a member of an elite cybersecurity defense team, you’ve been called to investigate a sophisticated breach within a critical infrastructure network. Intelligence points to a notorious APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) group known for leveraging tactics from the MITRE ATT&CK framework to target global organizations.

Your Mission:

In this challenge, you must track the adversary’s movements, detect breaches, and remediate attacks by identifying and mitigating various stages of their kill chain. The attackers have already infiltrated the network using phishing tactics, but their end goal remains unclear.

Scenario:

In this challenge, participants take on the role of cybersecurity experts hired by a large multinational company, Xenovate Corp, which has been hit by a devastating ransomware attack. The ransomware, known as IronCrypt, has encrypted critical servers and databases, halting all operations and putting sensitive customer and financial data at risk.

Your Mission:

The attacker has demanded a hefty ransom in cryptocurrency, threatening to leak sensitive information if the demand is not met within 72 hours. However, the company refuses to pay and seeks your expertise to investigate, mitigate, and recover from the attack.

Scenario:

A major tech company, TechChain Inc., has recently experienced a mysterious breach affecting its production systems. Critical software updates sent to thousands of customers have been compromised, causing widespread disruptions and potential data leaks. Initial investigations reveal that the attack originated from a vulnerable third-party supplier within their software supply chain.

Your Mission:

As a cybersecurity expert, you have been recruited to uncover the full extent of the breach. Your mission is to investigate the supply chain vulnerabilities, trace the origin of the malicious code, and neutralize any remaining threats. Along the way, you will encounter various challenges involving reverse engineering, secure code analysis, exploiting weak dependencies, and identifying compromised components.
The fate of TechChain Inc. and its customers rests on your ability to expose the hidden links of the supply chain attack and prevent future threats. Time is running out—can you stop the siege before it’s too late?

Scenario:

A powerful cybercriminal syndicate known as DarkCircuit has launched a series of coordinated attacks on critical infrastructure across the nation. Their primary target is Nexus PowerGrid, an energy company that controls the electricity and water supply for millions of people. DarkCircuit has exploited vulnerabilities in Nexus’s IoT devices and Operational Technology (OT) systems, causing rolling blackouts, disrupting water supply, and threatening national security.

Your Mission:

As an elite cybersecurity specialist, you’ve been recruited by a government task force to stop the attacks before they escalate further. Your mission is to infiltrate the compromised IoT and OT networks, identify the weak points in Nexus PowerGrid’s infrastructure, neutralize the malicious code, and bring DarkCircuit’s operations to a halt.

Throughout the challenge, you will face tasks that test your ability to hack, defend, and secure critical IoT and OT systems. These will range from identifying weak IoT protocols to exploiting industrial control system (ICS) vulnerabilities and performing real-time incident response.

The nation’s critical infrastructure is under siege, and time is running out. Can you breach DarkCircuit’s defenses and save Nexus PowerGrid before the system collapses?

Scenario:

A global financial institution, SecureBank, has reported unusual activity within its network. Several high-level user accounts behave suspiciously, accessing sensitive areas and exfiltrating critical data. The internal security team suspects that attackers have breached the Active Directory (AD) infrastructure, compromising key accounts and leveraging identity-driven attacks to move laterally through the network undetected.

Your Mission:

As a top cybersecurity analyst, you’ve been called to investigate and neutralize the threat. To maintain persistence, the attackers use sophisticated tactics, including credential theft, Pass-the-Hash, Golden Ticket attacks, and AD misconfigurations. They have already created multiple backdoor accounts to ensure continuous access.

Your task is to identify how the attackers gained initial access, uncover their foothold in the AD infrastructure, and shut down their lateral movement across the network. You must understand identity attacks, analyze AD logs, and reverse unauthorized privileges to prevent further damage.

Scenario:

In a world where interconnected systems rely heavily on APIs for communication, a leading fintech company, SecurePay, has become the target of a devastating cyber-attack. Hackers have discovered vulnerabilities in the company’s API infrastructure, allowing them to bypass authentication, access sensitive customer data, and disrupt critical financial services.

Your Mission:

As a skilled cybersecurity professional, you are tasked with investigating the breach, securing the exposed APIs, and tracking the attackers before they cause further damage. Throughout the challenge, you will encounter real-world API security issues such as broken authentication, excessive data exposure, rate-limiting bypass, and injection attacks.

The integrity of SecurePay’s customer data and the company’s reputation now rests on your ability to identify and exploit the flaws within their API architecture. Time is of the essence; can you stop the ‘API Apocalypse’ and restore order before the hackers fully compromise the system?

Scenario:

FortifyBank, a global financial institution, prides itself on having one of the most secure database infrastructures in the industry. However, a recent intrusion attempt has raised alarms within its cybersecurity team. An unknown group of attackers is actively targeting the bank’s critical database servers to exfiltrate sensitive customer data, including financial transactions and personal information.

Your Mission:

As part of a specialized cyber incident response team, you have been tasked with investigating the vulnerabilities in FortifyBank’s database infrastructure. The attackers have already exploited weak configurations, obscure injection points, and privilege escalation paths to establish a foothold in the system. Your mission is to track down the attackers, patch the exploited vulnerabilities, and recover stolen data.

Throughout this mission, you will face challenges that involve SQL injection, improper database permissions, misconfigured backups, and auditing security weaknesses in the database architecture.

Scenario:

A covert hacker collective known as DarkPulse has infiltrated the network of a high-security government agency. They’ve gained initial access to a low-level server, but their ultimate goal is to breach the agency’s most classified systems. To stop them, a team of elite cybersecurity professionals has been assembled to retrace DarkPulse’s steps, understand their tactics, and neutralize the threat.

Your Mission:

As one of the top cybersecurity experts on the team, your mission is to hack into the network, escalate privileges, and pivot through various layers of security—just as DarkPulse did. You’ll need to uncover hidden backdoors, bypass advanced firewalls, and use lateral movement techniques to gain deeper access. Along the way, you will encounter double-pivot scenarios that require you to chain multiple exploits and move through isolated network segments.

The future of national security depends on your ability to hack, escalate, and pivot more deeply into the network to uncover DarkPulse’s hidden tracks and secure the system before it completes its mission.

Scenario:

The world’s largest online retail platform, ShopSphere, has undergone a massive cyberattack just before the holiday season. Hackers have infiltrated its e-commerce ecosystem, targeting customer payment systems, inventory management, and order-processing pipelines. Sensitive customer data, including credit card information and personal details, is at risk of being stolen and sold on the dark web.

Your Mission:

As part of an elite cybersecurity response team, your task is to investigate the vulnerabilities exploited by the attackers, mitigate ongoing threats, and recover compromised systems. You’ll need to tackle various challenges, such as identifying fraudulent payment injections, reversing ransomware affecting inventory systems, patching vulnerabilities in APIs, and recovering stolen customer data from the dark web.

Scenario:

A global enterprise, CloudCorp, has recently migrated its entire infrastructure to the cloud, hoping to leverage the flexibility and scalability of cloud technologies. However, just weeks after the transition, they experience a massive cyberattack targeting their cloud environment. Critical services are disrupted, sensitive data is at risk, and attackers exploit misconfigurations, API vulnerabilities, and privilege escalations within the cloud infrastructure.

Your Mission:

As a member of an elite cybersecurity team, you are tasked with defending CloudCorp’s infrastructure. The attackers have left traces of their methods behind; your mission is to uncover these indicators of compromise, neutralize the attack, and secure the environment from further breaches. You will also face challenges involving cloud misconfigurations, IAM vulnerabilities, data exfiltration detection, API abuse, and lateral movement through cloud resources.