How the Idea came along to Design a Hacking Game ?
As a cybersecurity professional we all had to keep ourselves updated with latest hacking trends whether to use it in Penetration testing job role or working as part of Cybersecurity Red ,Blue or Purple Team.
This involves either joining sites like Tryhackme ,Hackthebox or Pentesterlab to name few and going through the different labs to improve our Hacking skills. I always find myself thinking how do I keep myself motivated and committed to
always come back to these sites and continuing my journey. I just wanted different challenge other than just solving this labs on this sites. At first I wanted to create my own vulnerable box using different vulnerabilities i have came across my career and make it challenging
and unique as well and in the end if I am satisfied i would submit it to Vulnhub. That sill didn’t feel like unique challenge to me. I have always loved playing video games especially after finishing up on Pretesting lab just to get my mind of things and have been using Unreal Engine
blue prints to create some games. I was watching these YouTube video on third person shooter game on great channel called Pitchfork academy. That is when it came to me to create a shooter game where the challenge is not only eliminating Enemy characters but also Hacking
into virtual vulnerable lab to earn points. That is when I started this journey to create a Third person shooter game that has Hacking lab challenge. This would also be very appealing to Gamers to find motivation to play game and also learn valuable white Hacker skills.
Tools used to Design this Hacking Game and Hacking Lab
The first challenge that I embarked on is creating the characters for my shooter game. I wanted it to be unique and also i didn’t want to start from scratch using some 3D characters design software like Maya, 3DSMax or Blender to name few but that would make this project long so i
chose Reallusion Character Creator software.
The reason that i chose that is because the software has presets and also modification menu called Morph targets that would allow to modify different parts of the characters body to make them unique characters. It would be huge undertaking if i where to start creating every character from scratch.
The Gaming Engine of choice is obviously Unreal Engine. I have exposure to the Game Engine in the past and it would be a lot easier than the alternative which is to start another Gaming Engine. In addition to that Unreal Engine comes with Blue Print which is visual scripting tool that
makes designing a game a lot easier as opposed to trying to learn C++. The other benefits is which is big plus Unreal Engine comes with a lot of Scene elements which you can use to design your scene.
The last part of the puzzle is creating Hacking Lab that would be virtualized for the gamer to access and try to Hack into the Gaming lab. The way to connect the Game to the Lab is using Custom web widget created inside the game that would allow the player to open browser and access
the Lab and exploit the vulnerability and get access to the Flag which is similar to CTF competition.
I designed the lab using XAMP , Ubuntu , Kali Linux and some windows virtual machines. The content of the Lab would expand but the first few labs where based on Brute Force, Command Injection , Local file inclusion and File upload vulnerabilities.
The objective of the Game Play
The player character who is part of the Red Team is sent on Mission to Eliminate the Blue Team members and once all the Blue Team members are eliminated
he would get access to datacenter . He would hack into the vulnerable Virtual machines for each level and retrieve the Flag.
Each level has Hacking Lab which would be open along with Timer that would expire depending on the complexity of the Lab. If the Timer expires the Red Team
Player would be overrun by new Blue Team members that would be spawning into the Game when the Timer expires and the player is not able to exploit the vulnerabilities and get the Flag.
To make this more interesting the Player gets paid in Coins for each task completed as part of the Game play.
Demo to the Game play
The Demo to Level 1 part of the Game has been shared to the you tube channel below and more details and additional Levels would be posted on the same channel. I am planning on creating another video or doing voice over this video to explain different part of the game that makes this Hacking shooter game interesting.
