Animated Commentator Enhanced Network Monitoring and Visualization Application for Cyber Security Competition

This paper presents an animated commentator enhanced application for visualization, animated commentary and broadcast of cyber security competitions. The visualization application seeks to engage the audience/spectators at cyber security competitions by presenting information pertinent to understanding the real-time events occurring on networks of competing team as they unfold. This paper focuses on the Network Monitoring and Visualization Application (NMVA) component and the animated commentator component. It also discusses how the two components interoperate. The role of NMVA is to monitor critical services and attacks on blue team networks. NMVA consists of five component types: components for monitoring network traffic, components for reporting various network messages, data storage components and a visualization component. The animated commentator component aims to engage the audience/spectators using a video game like approach.