AISA CyberCon 2025 - Incident Response Competition Village

Retrospect Labs are partnering with AISA to provide a competition style incident response event for cyber security professionals, enthusiasts, students, and those interested in the field who are attending CyberCon Melbourne 2025.

The competition is an exciting and fun way for you to test your technical incident response skills, as you work through a number of realistic scenarios - in a self-paced way - over three days.

What's involved

Participants will work their way through four scenarios that simulate a real-world cyber incident, impacting a fictitious organisation.

The scenarios are designed to test your incident response skills - for example, they will include forensic artefacts that participants will analyse to identify various Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), as well as understand what malicious activities have occurred and how the adversary undertook those activities (their tactics, techniques, and procedures used).

Retrospect Labs facilitators will be available at the Incident Response Competition Village – so come find us if you have any questions along the way!

When is it running?

The event will run for the duration of CyberCon Melbourne 2025 – with registrations opening at 10:30am on Wednesday, 15 October 2025 at the Incident Response Competition Village.

Prizes

There are some amazing prizes up for grabs for those who place in this event! Aside from bragging rights, the top three teams who achieve the highest combined scores for all four scenarios will receive cash prizes.

• First place $600
• Second place $300
• Third place $150

What do I need to bring?

We’ll provide you with the exercise scenario (including technical artefacts and files) via our cyber security exercise platform, Gauntlet. The village will be set up with some laptops (first come first serve) or you are welcomed to use your own device which is recommended. We are also providing a forensics analysis environment, known as Response Lab, but you will be able to download technical artefacts to analyse within your own analysis environment and using your own tooling.

Note: Response Lab has been pre-installed with many forensics tools. During the competition, we will not be updating or installing any additional tools.

Who's this for?

Anyone who will be attending CyberCon Melbourne 2025. You may be working in cyber, studying a related degree, or if you are just interested in learning more about incident response and have some basic cyber skills or knowledge, we encourage you to register and to give it a go.

Registration

For the competition, you can register either as an individual or as a team of up to three members.

Delegates with an Expo Hall Pass or Full Registration Pass are able to register.

To register, come find us as the Incident Response Village at CyberCon Melbourne 2025 where we can sign you up on the spot! (tip: decide on your team name ahead of time for the quickest registration)