On the 25th June 2025 Hacktonics supported the Bristol Industrial Control Systems Capture-The-Flag (BrICS-CTF) competition, organised by the University of Bristol, by providing a preliminary training session, offered to all competitors. This years event was attended by 42 participants from 11 teams, who completed our half day training followed by 2 days of intense competition. This year all participants were from industry, covering a number of sectors including water, power, manufacturing and consulting.

The event, funded by the Research Institute in Trustworthy Interconnected Cyber Physical Systems (RITICS), now in its third year, is the UKs only open access CTF event with a focus on industrial control systems. Hacktonics has supported the event for the past two years by providing training for all attendees in order to prepare participants for the event. The BrICS-CTF has a primary goal of supporting upskilling through practical experience, a philosophy we share, which is why we provide this training for no cost.

The provided course was our half day "Ethical Hacking for ICS 101" course, covering the basics of ICS, reconnaissance, device exploitation and process manipulation, using our Siemens training boxes and our LINICS ICS testing platform, which was deployed across laptops provided to participants. The training got participants familiar with attack techniques using our real devices, preparing them well for attacking similar devices during the competition.

Many participants continued to use LINICS throughout the competition. In particular, participants used our own Zathrics tool for performing device reconnaissance, and used our Python environment, pre-loaded with ICS protocol libraries, to complete process manipulation tasks. Users often searched through the Mitre Att&ck for ICS mapped menu to identify tools to use for their chosen task. In this user-led outing, LINICS was easy to deploy and stable across the two days of competition. Participants commented on the ease of use of LINICS and the array of relevant tools that are provided as part of the distribution.