Operation Dry Powder

WAR GAMES · LINUX · difficulty 5 · ~50 min · 40 steps

The autonomous defence appliance is dead. Drones, robots, machinery and radios are all yours now.

Briefing

04:47 local. You are the entire IT section of a forward tactical element: one operator, one shell, one t-shirt that says NO, I WILL NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER. The mobile AI command centre — the appliance that watched the network, wrote the firewall rules and made the fast decisions — took an unsigned firmware image at 04:41 and died at 04:44. It flushed the ruleset on the way out. Nothing is filtering. Nothing is alerting. On this network are three UAS, a tracked UGV, an excavator and a generator set on a CAN bus, an LTE modem, a satellite backhaul and a mesh of vehicle radios. Every one of them is now defended by exactly one thing: you, typing. Keep your powder dry. Work the layers in order and do not skip the boring ones.

Objectives

• Re-establish a manual filtering floor with the automation gone
• Restore trustworthy time and reject the spoofed GNSS fix
• Evict the unrostered node holding an on-path seat in the mesh
• Take back the drones, the robot and the machinery bus
• Close the cellular downgrade and the over-broad VPN peer
• Attest what is left, then attribute what the evidence actually supports

Return to the range lobby