Friday, April 6, 2007

Session 11 Review

The second las week was a great seminar. It was different as we discussed a lot about cyber security. I really have to admit agressing wit Prof. Gilbert Lee on this, cyber security is slowly getting more and more important and will probably be one of the most important jobs in the future as our world seems to grow even more and more dependent on the computer.Today technology keeps advancing beyond our imagination and there are always people able to find loop holes in systems.

It was extremely interactive and we had a small game with Prof Gilber and the rest of the class. He called the game Cyberterror beta. Each group of 2-3 students were handed out envelopes with different instructions and indicating their role in the game. The point of this game was to show us that no matter how much you try and protect your resources and assets there is always a threat and an angle you might be attacked from. Ofcourse it is also so much harder to attack than to defend. I was handed the role of being the terrorist. The other groups formed any of the 5 remaining teams: The Observers, The terrorists, The Banks, The Port, The Travel and The Police teams. In the first half me and my partner in the game decided to go out for even attacks against banks, a port and the police. Each of the other players in the game actually worked within their group to decide what they wanted to protect. And then in the end what we wanted to attack was tallied with what they defended. Our first round offered us 2 successful attacks out of 4.

The second round was a little more interesting where as the terrorists we were given more resources without this knowledge being presented to the other teams. We were asked to leave the class and inside the class the other groups all worked together to form different strategies to protect a more vast range of assets. There was also another twist. The group of observes were really supposed to be moles who were going to relay the information to us via SMS as to what is protected and what we can attack. Unfortunately though the obser(L)ves did not SMS these strategies and we had to use are own ones. We still managed to get a good amount of attacks.

The moral in the end was plain and simple. The resources available to terrorists are difficult to determine and it is so much harder to plan a strategis defence than an attack. There are also loops holes in systems which have to be worked on to prevent leaks.

At the end of the day, everyone of us enjoyed ourselves in this last lecture seminar with Prof Gilbert and the Cyberterror game played. It has indeed been a great learning curve throughout these 11 weeks and wow has time flown by! I have really enjoyed this class and am so glad I took it. I have learnt a lot from really unique methods of teaching and this blog too has given me a lot.

1 comment:

cellprof said...

FYI, the SMS server was at fault- the espionage message came through AFTER class. Thanks for your (occasionally quite insightful and therefore the most interesting) contributions. I am happy you enjoyed the learning methods we used for this subject.