Application of Learning

As the semester races by I continue to see students carry course concepts beyond the walls of the classroom. A few examples:

• One student is applying his knowledge of firewall rules to slam the door on hackers banging on his company's perimeter firewall. "I think I've dropped all of China," he says with a grin.
• Another student routinely catches ankle biters trying to brute force the authenticated door of the company FTP site. 
• Yet another used his white hat skills to crack the password (in less than 60 seconds!) of a laptop destined for the scrap heap: The original user figured that, since no one could remember the admin password, it was a candidate for the recycle bin.
• One student learned his company was replacing their old firewalls with Cisco devices and wanted to know how to configure them for failover -- one week before the failover lecture!
• Once a Ubuntu fan, Backtrack is now the operating system of choice on one student's work machine. 
• Others are using nMap to discover networks, implementing code to monitor for attacks, teaching administrators the balance of password complexity, and campaigning for the use of a passphrase rather than a password.
• They're conversant in the language of Wireshark, the three-way handshake, and know the difference between a full scan, half scan, and Xmas tree scan.
• In less than 60 seconds, given the IP address of an attacker, they can tell you target country of origin.

With port mirroring, Snort/IDS, system hardening, SQL injection, pen testing, and forensic analysis of a copier hard drive to go, these students -- and their local employers -- are definitely on the fast track.