Nathan He’s Reflection for RFK solutions camp day #2
Today, I came in and all the staff gave me a warm welcome. There was also a breakfast that was waiting for me. Then, we all went to one room and had a speaker that came from ODU come to talk about opportunities in the computer security field. His talk was very interesting as he spoke about different jobs in cybersecurity. After that, we did an ice-breaker that was about memorizing words that start with letters of the alphabet. After a break, we started learning about what the students did yesterday. We reviewed safety procedures, what causes risks of being unsafe, and also the troubleshooting theory. Then we started learning about hardware which they were parts of the computer. We learned about the motherboard which is the main circuitry. This is also known as the central board or the mainboard. I learned that hardware doesn’t work without software. We learned that BIOS is the base of the motherboard. This tells the motherboard of what to do. UEFI is the newest type of BIOS. CMOS is the battery for the BIOS and is the smallest component that is removable. We learned about the RAM which is temporary storage and moves information from the source to the processes. DIMM and SODIMM are both types of sticks of RAM. DIMM is for smaller devices. Also, ROM stands for read-only memory and is what the computer cannot change. Afterward, we learned about the north and the south bridges. The northbridge controls memory and traffic. Faster parts go to the north. The southbridge is like a filter. These control the input and the output of what goes into the motherboard. Slower parts go to the south. After going to the southbridge, the things are transferred to the northbridge. Also, there are traces on the bottom of the motherboard. Then, we had a very delicious lunch. The lunch was from Tropical Smoothie. There were smoothies, wraps, sandwiches, and chips. After lunch, we learned about the CPU which is the central processing unit. This processes 1’s and 0’s which are memory locations. There are about 10,000 parts in a micro-CPU (made by robots). The CPU cores do the calculations/processes. Now, some devices have a max of 64 cores. There are 2 types of CPUs. The LGA is the land grid array. This CPU has a flat bottom. The PGA has pins at the bottom. Both CPUs do the same thing. We learned about the different slots of the motherboard. The RAM slot holds the RAM stick that temporarily stores information. The expansion slots are a usually different color from the RAM slots. They hold expansion cards that give more functions for the computer. The VGA ports transfer videos. Storage ports include hard drives, SSD, floppy disks, etc. SATA connection is cables that connect storage bites to a motherboard. Lastly, I learned about the PSU which provides power to the motherboard. This was a wonderful day.
Nathan He’s Reflection for RFK solutions camp day #3
Today, I came in again and the staff gave me a warm welcome. The breakfast was amazing because there was a variety of food. Then, all of the kids went to a room and we had 2 guest speakers talk about hacking. We also did a basketball icebreaker and an icebreaker that had to do with finding things in common with a group of kids. Then, we did a lesson with Mr. Rimmer about hacking. We learned about hats, boxes, and teams. There are a black, grey, and white hat. There are also 4 teams. Red, blue, white, and purple are all the teams. Lastly, there are types of penetration tests(boxes) which are white, black, and grey boxes. Then, we celebrated Mr. Alberto’s birthday with a nice delicious cake. Lastly, our teacher showed us how to hack with hackthebox.com. Today was an amazing and fun day.
Nathan He’s Refection for RFK solutions camp day #4
As usual, I came in with welcoming staff and a very nice breakfast. There were corn dogs, biscuits, etc. Then we had a guest speaker from Regent University come in and talk about jobs in cybersecurity. She was in charge of hacking simulations. Then, we did 2 icebreakers. The first one was that we had to make a human knot and untangle ourselves from our group. Then, we did an icebreaker which was cyber bingo. Afterward, we started learning about social engineering. We learned that humans are the weakest link and this is because of greed and doing the wrong thing. We learned about ways humans get into social engineering. Hackers use impersonation, authority, consensus, intimidation, hoax, scarcity, urgency, familiarity, and trust. The attacks are phishing, spear phishing, whaling, vishing, URL hijacking, SPIM, and SPA. They also use shoulder surfing, tailgating, piggybacking, and dumpster diving. Lastly, the ways to prevent social engineering is by user training, never sharing passwords, never break policies for others, and learn to recognize suspicious behavior. Also, you need to learn what requests will not be made over email/phone, use the least privilege policy, use the clean desk policy, and log off of computers when you are not using it. You also should shred unneeded information, use a man trap, use spam filters, and use security cameras/alarms/system logging. Finally, we had a speaker. This was another amazing day.