Competitive Intelligence at PHDays 2012

We continue our story about the competitions held within the framework of the Information Security Forum Positive Hack Days 2012 . Today we will discuss one of the most popular online contests of the forum - the “ Competitive Intelligence ”, during which skills of searching for hidden information on the Internet were tested.

150 participants registered to participate in the competition, 60 of them were able to successfully cope with at least one task. User mchumichev took the lead on the first day and was able to keep him until the end of the competition, but the second and third place was a tense struggle. As a result, many participants scored the same number of points, but only the fastest were recognized as winners.

rules

Issues related to Disa Retail, the potato supplier, were published on the contest page.
')


Answers to these questions had to be searched on the Internet, in various social networks, both popular in our country and better known abroad (Facebook, Xing, Badoo, Pastebin).

Questions

In the course of the competition, the counter of incorrect answers was reset to several times, and participants had the opportunity to once again answer questions that they had previously answered incorrectly. Here is a complete list of questions in English (PHDays forum and the competition itself gathered participants from different countries):

1. Director full name
2. Head office address
3. Chief financial officer hobby (CFO)
4. Count of employees
5. Chief human resources officer salary (CHRO)
6. Chief marketing officer dog's breed (CMO)
7. Chief business officer hometown (CBO)
8. Chief technology officer favorite film (CTO)
9. Chief information officer favorite football team (CIO)
10. Net Income for 2011
11. The main competitor of the company
12. Chief information security officer birthday (CISO)
13. Chief learning officer auto (CLO)
14. Chief risk officer phone number (CRO)
15. Chief web officer favorite band (CWO)
16. Number of offshore account

Some questions were not as simple as it seemed at first glance. In addition, participants often confused the name of a company with a similar name to another, real-life company (Disa Retail Atlantico), and the number of incorrect answers turned out to be quite large as a result.

During the competition

It was most convenient for competitors to start searching from the website of the company disaretail.com, the contents of which were deleted by the time the competition started, but remained in the search engine cache. Rummaging through the cached pages you could find the answers to the first two questions. By selecting the folders on the site, it was possible to find the folder / docs /, which contained the company's financial report, which answered two more questions: the company's net income for 2011 and its offshore account number.

A lot of useful information about employees of Disa Retail, which was necessary to complete the tasks of the competition, could be obtained from the website linkedin.com , including the addresses of their Twitter accounts ( one and the second ), which also contained answers and tips.

Information about the company and the number of its employees could be found on Facebook . The salary of one of the company's employees could be learned from the conversation recording in the chat posted on Pastebin . In addition, answers to some questions could be found in the profiles of company employees on dating sites (for example, here and here ).

Winners

To successfully complete the tasks of the competition, participants had to expand the usual set of search tools: the winners of the competition used several search engines and social networks at once. The pedestal of honor looks like this:

I. mchumichev;
Ii. djecka;
Iii. Maxfrost.

In addition, merced 2001, which took IV place, wrote an excellent post with the analysis of competitive tasks.

The winners received memorable prizes and gifts. Congratulations!

PS Some participants tried to just guess the answers, but it turned out to be very difficult :) Next year we will try to make the Competitive Intelligence competition even more intense and interesting.