The Competitive Intelligence Contest’s Outcome

Competitive Intelligence became one of the most popular online contests at Positive Hack Days, the international forum on practical security. The contest was held during May 15, 16 and 17. It checked the participants' skills in searching for certain information in the internet.

Many of us heard about actions of the Anonymous group. Competitive Intelligence gave each participant an opportunity to feel like an agent who is assigned to penetrate into such a group. According to the story, a participant finds himself to be a new member of Anneximous, an underground gang. The task is to gather information about the leaders of ATH, competitors from the World Wide Idol group and about dishonest members of the newly-made agent’s own community.

This time tasks were more difficult as compared to the last year's contest. A competitive intelligence researcher needs a great number of different skills and should be able to handle various tools and plugins. That's why we decided to make tasks more challenging. However, traditional requirements for deductive thinking and the ability to find links between data are still applicable.

The contest was finished at 7:00 pm on May 17, though some participants offered their answers after the contest was over. 301 participants registered to compete in the contest, 82 solved the intro task. A participant with the nickname The.Ghost became the winner of the main prize — iPad. Second place went to yarbabin, and MooGeek took third place. Other details are available in the table below.

| Nickname | Points | Place | | ----------------------------------- | ---------- | --------- | | The.Ghost | 230* | I | | yarbabin | 195* | II | | MooGeek | 130* | III | | godzillanurserylab | 105* | | | topol | 35* | | | Eugene-vs | 20 | | | supertramp | 20 | | | ReallyNonamesFor | 20 | | | Anatolik11 | 20 | | | true-bred | 0* | | | gohome | 0* | | | File_marshall | 15 | | | * excluding 20 points for task 2.4 | | |

A detailed analysis of the contest's tasks is available in our blog. Some of the tasks turned out too difficult for every one of the participants, which is why the competition was extended.