Step into The Honeycomb, the place for cybersecurity built by HiveHack.
When you look at a honeycomb, it appears to be perfect and strong… right? Every hacker abides one fact: look closely, and you are bound to find weaknesses even in the most perfect-looking systems. This year at DefCamp, we created a place filled with various challenges to put your cybersecurity skills into practice! Whether you are good at attacking, defending or both, you are more than welcome to join the ride!
What is inside The Honeycomb?
The main attraction: The Honey Vault
This is the center of our place. The Honey Vault is a laboratory where you can practice attacking and defending. Not only do you have to break into systems by exploiting found weaknesses, which provides you with “honey”, but also protect and enforce your own to block the attackers’ entrance. It is a true battle of wits that demands of you quick thinking, speed and strategy.
The Hive “Beengo”
Want to participate in a new, fun and exciting challenge format at DefCamp? Come and get yourself a HiveHack “Beengo”! The rules are straight-forward: solve a full row, column or diagonal of challenges from many categories, including OSINT, Forensics, Web Exploitation, Reverse Engineering and more, and you are guaranteed to win superb gifts from HiveHack!
That is all for now! We may not have much quantity, but we focus on providing quality. We highly hope you are going to have one of, if not the best experiences at our village and DefCamp altogether. We encourage both newbies and experts in cybersecurity to come along and give us a try – we guarantee that you are going to leave with something new learned along the way! Enjoy #theHive.
Below, you will find the Rules of Engagement for the Honey Vault exercise, do make sure to give it a thorough read!
Goal
Goal of the Competition
Rules
Welcome to Honey Vault – Where the Sweetest Data Is the Hardest to Keep!
Honey Vault (Attack & Defence Lab) is The Honeycomb’s (powered by Hive Hack) main attraction at this year’s DefCamp. Two sides, one hive: one team fights to keep the vault sealed, the other fights to walk away with the “honey”.
Inspired by how a real colony works – guards at the entrance, alarms rippling through the comb, and intruders probing for a way in, Honey Vault drops you into a live network, where every action has a defender on the other end. This is not just a static CTF. – the infrastructure is breathing, someone is watching your traffic, and the scoreboard moves while you think.
Choose your side:Guard Bees (Blue Team) – harden the hive, read the alerts, kick out what should not be there;Hornets (Red Team) – enumerate, pivot, escalate, and bring the Queen down.
New to this? Perfect. Our Beekeepers are on-site the whole time to explain what you’re looking at, hand you the right tools, and get you unstuck. No gatekeeping, no pressure – just a swarm of people figuring it out together.
What you will find at Honey Vault:/A live Attack & Defence range: real Active Directory, real SIEM, real consequences;/Guided entry points for first-timers, and deep water for those who want it;/Honeypots, deception traps, and detections you can actually watch fire off;/Hive-themed chaos, hexagonal scoreboards, and far too many bee puns.
Come for the honey. Stay for the sting.
Rules of Engagement
1. Respect the Hive – Treat participants, Beekeepers, and organizers with respect. – Harassment, discrimination, or gatekeeping has no place here. – Nobody gets mocked for asking a basic question. Ever.
2. Learn First, Score Second – Ask the Beekeepers : they are here to help, not judge. – Talk to the opposing side once a round ends. Hornets explain the attack, Guard Bees explain the detection -that is where the learning happens. – Collaboration for learning is encouraged. Sharing flags is not.
3. Keep the Hive Alive – Guard Bees: your services must stay online and reachable. – Hornets: own the box, do not kill it. No wiping, no encrypting. – Leave the logs alone. They are the shared story of what happened.
4. Fair Play Only – Attack the range, not the scoreboard, the VPN, or anyone’s laptop. – Keep your scans sane — no floods, no -T5 across the whole range. The hive is shared. – Found a bug in our infrastructure? Let us know instead of exploiting it — responsible disclosure earns bonus points.
5. Stay Ethical & Legal – Everything in Honey Vault is isolated and synthetic. Only the targets listed in the briefing are in scope. – The range runs in a dedicated cloud environment. The cloud console, the account behind it, the VPN, and anything outside the lab network are off-limits. – Your authorization stops at the edge of this range.
6. Enjoy the Sting – Take breaks. Drink water. Look at what the other team is doing. – Getting owned is not failure — it is the fastest way to learn what to watch out for the next time you come around. – Attempt the thing you are not sure will work. That is the whole point.
PRIZES
TBD
