Mayhem System is Preliminary Cyber Grand Challenge Hacking Tournament Winner
A computer system called ‘Mayhem’ has so far won the Cyber Grand Challenge hosted by Darpa. The aim of the tournament was to develop a system that can automatically withstand and execute Internet attacks.
The system was designed by the ForAllSecure team, who won $2 million. The tournament was set up as a capture the flag, in which the participating systems had to detect vulnerabilities in software themselves and at the same time discover the weaknesses in the systems of the opponents. The whole thing took about ten hours before a winner was announced. The systems ‘Xandra’ and ‘Mechanical Phish’ took second and third place respectively. Referees have yet to check the result before it is officially announced on Friday.
Darpa, which has invested $55 million in the project, wants to use the tournament to promote the development of systems that can automatically perform security tasks. This includes, for example, identifying vulnerabilities and patching them. In total, 650 vulnerabilities were found and 421 patches written by the seven participating systems, Reuters said. The event could be followed via live streams and large screens and was commented by two hackers.
Image via ForAllSecure