Register a Team

Find up to three (3) other people to play with you, or play by yourself. Some things to note are:

• Read the rules and check the FAQ. Contact us for questions.
• If you have team members under the age of 18, we will need the DC3 Permission to Participate Form for each team member in addition your team's application.
• Once your team is formed, designate a point of contact (POC). They will become the primary contact of the team for all DC3 Challenge communications.

When your team is ready, apply your team for the DC3 Challenge 2011 and follow its directions.

Get Approved to Play

Once your application is submitted:

• The DC3 Challenge team processes the applications into its offline Challenge management system.
• The Challenge management system defines the team's demographics and available prizes based on the application data.
• Information from the application is verified for accuracy by the DC3 Challenge Team.
• The DC3 Challenge team marks the team as approved or denied based on application accuracy and eligibility.

Once the team's application is approved, then the DC3 Challenge teams performs the following:

• Sends an approval email to the team's point of contact (POC).
• Sends a login email to the team's point of contact (POC) from the Challenge download system.

Download the Challenge

Using your pre-generated login and password, your team can download the packages for each individual DC3 Challenge exercise.

• Each package contains the exercise's worksheet and the required data files for the exercise. Level 500 exercies only contain the exercise's worksheet.
• Packages are compressed by WinZip, ranging from a few kilobytes to almost a gigabyte, depending on the exercise's data files.

Solve the Exercises

Once you have downloaded the DC3 Challenge exercises: Ready, Set, GO! It is up to you what order you do the exercises. You can do some of the exercises, or all of them. The more exercises completed, the more points possible.

Keep in mind when solving exercises of the bonus points schedule. These give up to 20% additional points to your submission grade based on when you submit your exercise to the DC3 Challenge. (i.e. Exercise #101: 90 pts graded x 20% bonus = 108 points total)

Submit your Solutions

Once you are ready to submit solutions, team submission packages can be submitted to DC3 via two ways:

• By single packages for each exercise (RECOMMENDED)
• By a complete package of all DC3 Challenge solutions at submitted

Include your exercise number and your team name in the file name (i.e. 'Team DC3 - 101.zip')

Submissions should be uploaded electronically throught the Challenge download system using your emailed credentials.

All DC3 Challenge 2011 solutions, including scripts and non-commercial programs created by the team, must be uploaded or postmarked to DC3 no later than November 1st, 2011 at 11:59:59 PM EST to be eligible for a prize in their assigned category.

Get Graded to Win

Points are awarded for each individual exercise, with a set number of points and criteria. All grading is done internally by DC3 forensic examiners and is peer reviewed for accuracy and fairness. Bonus points are then added to final scores of each exercise based on its submission date by the internal Challenge management system. Total points are then calculated by the system based off the sum of the final graded exercise scores and the sum of the total bonus points generated by the team.

Once a grading round is completed, the leaderboard is updated and announcements are made to the team's POC and Challenge news. Prize awards and actual points scored are withheld until final scores are announced on 01 Dec 2011.