Teaching Cyber Security (Part 1)
Intro
I teach Physics in an all-girls school and run a coding club once a week. My students are free to join, and are between the ages of 10 and 17.
My first surprise came with the absolute top favorite subject to learn in coding club: H4CKING!. Yep, 12 year old girls would also love to hack your computer! And to be honest, so did I when I was their age. My first contact with linux was a good friend from Senegal who had installed slackware at home. Watching commands stream from his fingers was mesmerizing. Let alone connecting with a modem to download packages or free games in 1996 ... and "Oh, by the way, Tidiane, can we connect to the Pentagon?".
Well, it's 2017 and teenagers are still fascinated with making computers do what seems like magic. Of course if you offer a course about Bash or the linux operating system you are guaranteed between zero and epsilon attendance. So instead my coding club offers 4 options:
Create Art | Make Music | Hacking for cybersecurity | Pure Coding
I'd like to share my "Hacking" course which I hope can be of use to other teachers and schools. My course runs on codio.com and was inspired by their Intro to Linux. However, it's just a bunch of markdown. So if your students have access to a Linux shell, you can offer a bounty and you have a server you can mess with, you can copy it and run it yourself. The content is not meant to be rigorous, but rather to give a flavour of what is possible when you learn linux & Bash. (Published with a CC-BY License)
1.1.1 Welcome to this course!
You are here to learn about the tools used in cyber security. To make it more interesting you will be given a mission! Your mission is:
fix the security of the <SCHOOL-NAME> secret server.
But what is a server? Where is it? and what is there to fix?
A server is a computer connected to the Internet. Usually it doesn't have a screen, a keyboard or a mouse. We will learn how to interact with it. To make it more interesting, a bounty has been placed inside the server. This server is in Holland:
[Source]
In a small town near Amsterdam there is a server farm (This is a building full of servers connected to the Internet). This is what the building looks like:
In one of the hallways, cooled and secured behind security gates is our server:
If you can get into the server, there are 15m฿ (fifteen milli-Bitcoins) waiting for you there. If you get in and make sure nobody else can get it (make it secure), there is another 15m฿ prize. To do this you will need to learn many skills:
How do you find a server on the internet?
How do you find its location?
How do you interact with this computer?
How do you get in?
How do you crack the password?
How do you read what's inside?
How do you find hidden files?
How do you visit the folders inside?
How can you secure the sever?
How would you detect an unauthorised intrusion?
Let the mission begin!
--> [Continue Part 2]
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