From January 25 to 27 the University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH) played host to the 3rd Security and Cyber Defense Conference. On Monday Jan 25 we began our collaboration with CIBERSEG by offering a hacking workshop, followed by a Capture the Flag competition on iPhalanx, our cybersecurity training platform. A CTF (Capture the Flag) is a security competition in which the participants play an active role in a system and have to apply their security knowledge and other skills to solve the challenges posed.

Monday started early for us because first light saw us preparing the lab with the help of Professor Enrique de La Hoz so that the students would find their computers ready booted and everything would run smoothly. The hacking workshop started at 10 am, by which time the 12 students enrolled had taken their seats and were ready to listen to the explanations from our unit colleague Luis Miguel Cerrato.

During the workshop Luis Miguel guided the students in a three-part exercise: 1) Gathering information, 2) Exploiting vulnerabilities, 3) Post-exploitation.  In the first part he explained the nmap tool, pointing out the most useful options for network discovery and port scan tasks. The second part, naturally, focused on Metasploit, and in the last part, post-exploitation, the students experimented with netcat. The participants also had the chance to explore a training exercise included in the iPhalanx CTER (Cyber Training and Exercise Range) catalog. Each participant had access in an isolated environment to a computer configured to complete the exercise.

After the workshop we took a break to allow the students to recharge their batteries for the Capture the Flag competition. This commenced at 12 noon, and iPhalanx CTF was the platform used to challenge the participants. Once again, the pressure of the last 30 minutes had the effect of fine-tuning the competitors' actions. With just 15 minutes to go, less than 200 points separated the first two participants (the winner scored 2250 points), but there were no last-minute changes and Daniel Domínguez Álvarez held on to the first position.

On Tuesday Jan 26 the Polytechnic assembly hall hosted a variety of talks and workshops on cybersecurity. This year CIBERSEG drew more than 500 people from the academic world, police, civil guard, armed forces, etc. The conference was opened by the secretary of state and director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Félix Sanz Roldán, and the university rector Fernando Galván. After the opening session, the winner of the previous day's CTF collected his prize. It was great to see the satisfaction on Daniel's face when he saw his Sony SmartWatch. As a former student of the University of Alcalá de Henares, it was very moving to give my five-minute speech in an assembly hall that holds many dear memories for me. Even so, I would be delighted to help my old faculty and university again in the future, and this is sure to be the first of many collaborations between our Cybersecurity Unit and the CIBERSEG Conference.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers of CIBERSEG '16 for their collaboration, and Prof. Enrique de La Hoz in particular for his unstinting assistance that made everything so easy. We are proud to continue raising awareness about the importance of cybersecurity training, and we are certain that iPhalanx has a crucial role to play both now and in the near future. Many professionals will undoubtedly use this platform to improve their knowledge and build a safer cyber world.