For the past month or two I have been completing the 48 modules of CyberStart Essentials, part of the government’s free online extracurricular cyber security programme. Each module was made up of several sub-topics and a half hour test. They covered things such as networking, computer hardware, Windows, Linux, exploitation, forensics and much more.
I found the modules very informative and interesting and enjoyed being introduced to topics beyond the school syllabus. Surprisingly, my favourite topics were hardware and lower-level exploits such as buffer overflows. I also enjoyed learning to exploit web applications using techniques such as cross-site injection and file inclusion.
At the end of the programme there was a 90 minute test covering all of the modules. I scored 96%, which I’m very happy with.
I’m now looking at ways to practice the skills I have learned in the programme. In the school computing club we are creating a chat room application that is going to be vulnerable to SQL injection and cross site scripting, which I will then be able to teach the members about. I’m also looking into VulnHub which hosts virtual machines with purposeful vulnerabilities for you to exploit. My plan is to download one of the beginner level machines and see how I get on.
Brychan Thomas' projects 