The challenge

AI now sits on both sides of the keyboard. Attackers use it to speed up reconnaissance and chain exploits, while defenders lean on AI assistants to triage alerts and guide hardening. Most security teams have never practiced working with an AI assistant under real pressure or learned when to trust its advice and when to verify it.

The experience

Bot Wars is a six hour, live, proctor-led Cyber Range event. PwnSat Inc. runs the telemetry, tracking, and command ground segment for a satellite fleet, redundantly from multiple ground stations. A severe geomagnetic storm knocks out the links between those stations, and every ground system now believes it is the live, authoritative copy. Left unresolved, corrupted commands could reach the fleet and put satellites at risk. SAVE dispatches a team to each site, and each team must prove its system should survive as the system of record: harden and validate its own environment while forcing the others to stand down. Working in teams of four, participants:

Attack and defend at the same time. Secure your team's copy of the PwnSat network while going after opposing teams' copies, from web application exploitation and exposed credentials to lateral movement into Windows domain systems.
Work with a dedicated Red AI Assist and Blue AI Assist. Use them to interpret tool output, prioritize next steps, triage alerts, and guide patching, while your team stays in control of every action.
Keep critical services healthy while you compete. Downtime costs your team, so every hardening decision has a tradeoff.
Use Kali Linux to enumerate, exploit, and pivot against opposing environments.
Investigate and respond with Security Onion, Suricata, and Zeek for network visibility, ModSecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set for web application protection, and Elastic Agent with Sysmon and auditd for host telemetry.
Validate and remediate with Greenbone/OpenVAS for vulnerability scanning and Trivy for repository and secret scanning, building the offensive and defensive instincts AI-assisted operations demand.

Business outcomes

A clear, evidence-based picture of how your team performs with AI assistance under real attack conditions.
Proof of whether your team can harden, detect, and respond while defending live services against a competing adversary.
A measurable readiness baseline for AI-assisted offensive and defensive security skills.

Who should attend

Red team members, penetration testers, SOC analysts, blue team defenders, security engineers, and AI/ML practitioners interested in how AI changes security operations. Intermediate to advanced difficulty; the scenario is cross-industry, and the skills apply to every industry.