Objective

Cisco Neuro Nemesis places participants inside a high-intensity red and blue team experience where an advanced adversarial AI system begins orchestrating large‑scale cyber attacks. The League has developed NEMESIS, an AI engine built to infiltrate, manipulate, and sabotage critical systems. Your mission is to defend NEURO, a RAG‑enabled financial application, while uncovering and degrading NEMESIS's ability to control attacks across global networks.

Who should play

This scenario is designed for intermediate SecOps engineers, SIEM and SOAR analysts, and defenders interested in investigating AI‑driven threats. Anyone interested in exploring both sides of AI‑driven security will find this challenge engaging. Participants analyze unusual model behavior, investigate signs of manipulation or data exposure, and also experiment with controlled red‑team techniques like prompt injection and model interference to understand how these attacks unfold in real environments.

Why it matters

AI‑enabled systems introduce new risks that traditional security models struggle to address. Defenders must understand how malicious actors exploit LLMs, poison training data, insert backdoors, and misalign models to alter system behavior. Neuro Nemesis reinforces practical skills needed to detect and respond to AI‑centric attacks while highlighting the operational impact of shadow AI and compromised automation within real environments.

Tools

Participants will work with a collection of Cisco and partner technologies that support the investigation and defense of AI‑enabled systems. These include Cisco AI Defense, Isovalent's Cilium with Hubble and Tetragon for runtime visibility, and Splunk Cloud for SIEM analytics. Together, these tools provide insight into model behavior, network activity, and adversarial manipulation as teams work to protect NEURO and disrupt NEMESIS's operations.