Event description
Retrospect Labs and the Australian Women in Security Network (AWSN) have partnered again to provide a competition style incident response exercise for women working, studying, and interested in the sector across Australia. The competition is an exciting and fun way for you to use both your technical and strategic skills to work through a realistic cyber incident - in a self-paced way - over 10 days. You can either register as an individual and be placed into a team of up to five (all with mixed skillsets), or register as a team of 3-5 participants, to work through the fictious incident and complete tasks along the way. At the conclusion of the event, there will be a judging panel, with the winning team announced and prizes for those teams who place in the top three!
This competition could not have happened without the support from the event’s key sponsor, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD).
Note: This event will feature a brand-new scenario, so those who have previously participated in a competition provided by Retrospect Labs, are encouraged to get involved and participate again in this competition.
What does the competition involve?
For ten days, starting on Friday 28th November 2025, participants will work their way through a scenario that simulates a real-world cyber incident, impacting a fictitious organisation. The scenario is designed to test your incident response skills, and so it includes several aspects common to incident response. For example, the exercise will include forensic artefacts that participants can 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). Participants will also be required to perform tasks that relate to managing the media, providing communications to senior leadership, and providing legal and privacy considerations in response to the incident. If you have an interest or skillset in these areas, you will also fit great into a team.
Throughout the exercise, teams will submit responses to certain tasks common to incident response activities. After the competition closes, submissions will be reviewed by a panel of judges to evaluate the performance of each team during the event and we will announce the top 3 winning teams during a virtually hosted closing ceremony.
Not only will the winning team earn the title 'Winner of the 2025 AWSN Incident Response Competition', but there are also some awesome prizes up for grabs!
Prizes
The full list of prizes is still yet to be confirmed, but we will announce all of the amazing prizes when we can!
When is it running?
Competition official opening – Friday 28th November 2025 at 9am (AEDT)
Competition official close – Sunday 7th December 2025 at 11:55pm (AEDT)
Closing Ceremony – Monday 15th December (timing to be announced).
In the lead up to the event, there will also be several virtual sessions that you can choose to attend. These sessions will give you a chance to hear from various industry professionals who may share some tips and tricks that you can leverage throughout the competition, provide some insight into what they do, and/or discuss an incident that they were personally involved in. More details on these sessions will be available closer to the event.
Who's this for?
Anyone in Australia who identifies as a woman, working in cyber, studying a related degree, or if you are 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!
It would be beneficial to have some SOC/Incident Response skills (some familiarity with common incident response tools or incident response frameworks). However, you do not need to have these technical skills to participate in a team.
We don’t expect you to know everything about incident response, but we want you to want to learn along the way, find out what you do enjoy about IR, and get excited about it!
Registration
There are two registration options this year:
- Register as an individual ($15 registration fee) - You will be asked a few questions to give us an understanding of your experience. This information will be used to put together teams based on individual strengths, so please answer the questions as best you can. Teams will be made up of women from around Australia – so you might be working in a team with people from a different town, city, or state!
- Register as a team ($45 registration fee) - You can form your own team of 3 to 5 individuals. Teams would benefit from having a mix of skills in the fields of computer forensics, communications and legal/privacy. The registration form requires you to provide a name and email for each team member.
We understand that some of you may be experiencing financial difficulties or are unable to pay the registration fee. If this is the case, we would still love you to participate, so we ask that you reach out directly to: programs@awsn.org.au
Once you have registered and the teams have been finalised, your team will receive an email with some further information and instructions (note that your email will be shared with your team members). Closer to the competition start date, you will be invited to a Slack channel, which will contain a space for you to communicate with your team and to receive any communications from the competition organisers during the event.
Please note that places are strictly limited to 250 participants. Once tickets are fully allocated, you can put your name on the waitlist and we will contact you if a space opens up.
Registrations open – Monday 6th October 2025 at 10am (AEDT)
Registrations close – Friday 7th November 2025 at 5pm (AEDT) – if places are not fully allocated prior.
Your team will also be given access to Retrospect Labs' cyber security exercise platform, Gauntlet. Gauntlet will be used for distributing the scenario (known as injects), forensic artefacts, and is where you will submit your task responses.
Response Lab
Following the feedback from last year's event, as well as to reduce the technical resource requirements for participants, all teams will again be provided access to a cloud-based forensic environment, which we call Response Lab. This environment will be primed with all the tools you require to analyse the technical artefacts involved throughout the competition and will be simply accessible from your internet browser. That means you don’t need to set up your own virtual machines or forensic labs this year. Unless you want to, of course.
What else do I need to know?
In collaboration with their team, participants will be able to control the pace of the exercise and will have the flexibility to compete outside of work hours. Teams can start the exercise whenever they like and work through it at their own pace – but everything must be completed by 7th December. Participants won't be judged on how long they take to complete the challenge.
Out of respect for the organisers and the judges taking their time to run this competition, as well as for your other team members, we ask that anyone who can no longer participate to notify us of their withdrawal using this Early Dropout Form.
Any queries about this competition can be directed to: competition2025@retrospectlabs.com
