Today was quite fun for being a school day. Actually, Thursday’s usually are pretty fun in general because it’s the day that I have my Security Engineering lab. Our teacher feels that one of the best ways to teach us how to secure systems is to first teach us how people actually break into them. We’ve done some thing’s with Digital Forensics (analyzing hard drives and such to see what the user has been doing on that particular computer), Packet Sniffing, and today we started doing the Introduction to Penetration Testing (exploiting a system).
So our assignment for today was to boot up two virtual machines on our computer. One of them was a typical Windows XP machine, while the other was Windows Server 2000. We then got to use the XP machine and some exploitation tools to basically attack the server. We added users as admins, modified and took control of files, and some other neat things which we had to answer questions on. I’ve never really liked an IT lab thus far in college as much as I like this one (probably becuase it’s NOT programming – YAY).
It’s funny though, the two IT classes that I have liked the most so far were Analysts Notebook and Security Engineering. Both of these are applied pretty heavily to the criminal justice field. Analysts Notebook is a program put out by a company called I2 which allows you to create charts in order to analyze data. If you’ve ever seen one of those huge maps about 9/11 with all the terrorist’s pictures and the lines linking them to what their part in the attack was, most likely that chart was made with Analysts Notebook. And then Security Engineering is all about finding how people try to crack systems and stopping them, or finding information on a computer that a criminal has tried to hide.
Maybe they really were right when they said if I just stopped worrying about trying to decide what I wanted to do when I graduate that something might reveal itself. I think that I really like the idea that my inner geek could actually be used to help other people.
Your lab does sound like it’s a lot of fun to partake in. I’d be interested in something like that as a class.
That does sound fun. I’m a geek too who used to love going to class.
That assignment did sound quite fun. Revealing what you want to do with your degree is always nice too!
That class sounds like a lot of fun. I’ve been unfortunate enough to have only had terribly boring IT classes.
Glad you’re enjoying your security engineering class! It actually sounds quite interesting to me, and I know absolutely nothing about programming or anything like that, lol. I think you’re right too about not worrying about what to do when you graduate – just focus on enjoying your remaining time at college and doing well, and you’ll figure something out later. Good luck hon!