During my junior-senior year summer, I took and completed nine more credits for a twelve credit Information Security Certificate from Moraine Park Technical College. This course was an outstanding learning experience that I am so thankful to have had the opportunity to participate in. The certificate entailed an four two-week courses that met Monday-Friday from 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM.
At the start of the course, students split up which created a divide in the class: those who defended and those who attacked. I related the class very closely to the space race because my team, the penetration testers were racing to poke as many holes as possible before the other team, the defenders, could secure every flaw in their copy of windows. This was a long and stressful process to begin as Kali Linux, my distro of choice, would not boot onto the desktop I was given, forcing me to adapt and instead use Back-Track 5, which is still the choice of many in the information security field.
I learned lots of awesome functions that I could do with Back-Track, and more importantly, I learned how I could defend myself from these vulnerabilities on my computers at home and work. During the eight-weeks, I dropped the WiFi network, froze every computer on the network, spoofed a text message from my professor, cracked a WiFi password, and more. Unfortunately, we were not able to break into the other teams computers, which I blame on the fact that they were not set up with any real-world programs, such as Java which is known for its numerous security flaws. These computers were set with the bare minimum to run, which effectively blocked our team out but also was not an accurate representation of a real-world penetration test.
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