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Challenge

Banking Infrastructure Threat Defense with Claude Agents SDK and Protect AI

Advanced persistent threat campaigns targeting core banking APIs demand automated threat hunting and rapid vulnerability mitigation. You will build an autonomous security agent that inspects API traffic logs for zero-day exploit patterns and automatically generates firewall patch configurations, successfully mitigating attack vectors under simulated adversary conditions.

CybersecurityHosted by Vera
Challenge brief

What you are building

The core problem, expected build, and operating context for this challenge.

Leverage Claude Agents SDK combined with Protect AI security guardrails to build an autonomous threat hunting and defense pipeline for core banking APIs.

Delivery guide

How work is evaluated

Evaluation

Evaluates agent ability to classify malicious traffic patterns and generate syntactically correct WAF rules.

Datasets

Challenge datasets

Public datasets, plus the private datasets you have access to.

Evaluation rubric

How submissions are scored

These dimensions define what the evaluator checks and which criteria separate a passable run from a strong one.

Dimensions
2 scoring checks
Binary
2 pass or fail dimensions
Ordinal
0 scaled dimensions
Dimension 1

waf_syntax_valid

Checks whether generated WAF rule parses cleanly without errors

Binary check

This dimension contributes its full weight only when the submission satisfies the requirement. Partial credit is not awarded.

Dimension 2

mitigation_rate

Percentage of malicious attacks correctly mitigated • target: 0.98 • range: 0.9-1

Binary check

This dimension contributes its full weight only when the submission satisfies the requirement. Partial credit is not awarded.

Learning goals

What you should walk away with

  • Deploy Claude Agents SDK with computer use and extended thinking capabilities

  • Integrate Protect AI runtime security scanners to inspect LLM inputs and responses

  • Analyze network traffic logs to detect advanced persistent threat (APT) indicators

  • Synthesize automated Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule sets to block exploits

Resources and assets

Reference links and supporting material

Dataset notes

Synthetic core banking API log stream containing normal transaction traffic mixed with sophisticated nation-state attack vectors.

Challenge setup

Evaluates agent ability to classify malicious traffic patterns and generate syntactically correct WAF rules.

Challenge input

JSON log snippet detailing malicious payload

Claude Agents SDK

Primary framework powering agent reasoning and extended thinking cycles.

Protect AI

Provides runtime guardrails and prompt safety scanning.

Evaluated output

JSON containing threat_type, detected_signature, and generated_waf_rule

Evaluation checks
  • Checks whether generated WAF rule parses cleanly without errors
  • Percentage of malicious attacks correctly mitigated • target: 0.98 • range: 0.9-1
Configured evaluation evidence
  • Benchmark: CyberDef-Bench
  • Mitigation Rate target: 98%
  • 1 public reference case
Configured runtime
  • Python execution harness
  • Python sandbox (unavailable on Versalist)

Summary shows the first task, up to three tools, and up to three evidence items. Open the technical recipe to view all configured items.

View technical recipe

Configured tools

Action Space
  • Claude Code · Optional
Observation
  • Claude Code · Optional
Policy Serving
  • Claude 4.1 Opus · Optional
Safety / Guardrails
  • Protect AI · Required

Evaluation contract

  • waf_syntax_valid · Weight 1
  • mitigation_rate · Weight 1

Metrics

  • mitigation_rate · Target 0.98

Benchmarks

  • CyberDef-Bench
  • security

Reference cases

  • 1 public reference case

Workflow tasks

  1. Task 1

    Input: JSON log snippet detailing malicious payload

    Output: JSON containing threat_type, detected_signature, and generated_waf_rule

    Execution harness: Python

Evaluation tools

  • Claude Agents SDK · agent_framework
  • Protect AI · ai_engineering_tooling

Recipe freeze marker

No recipe freeze time is recorded.

Frequently Asked Questions about Banking Infrastructure Threat Defense with Claude Agents SDK and Protect AI