AMANDA DEDIE
Staff Writer
Among various new classes seen floating around this semester, a name has been catching everyone’s eye: Ethical Hacking. When people hear the word “hacking,” they almost instantly think of a sci-fi movie, where a man wearing big, geeky glasses types frantically on a keyboard while two big guys, too technologically inept to do it themselves, wait behind him in anticipation, before the hacker turns around with a gleam in his eye and a smirk on his face, going, “We’re in.”
Interested, you look it up on Fredonia’s Fast Class Search, where you read, “Introduction to penetration testing; Introduction to Linux; C programming in Linux; Introduction to Kali; Sandboxes and Virtual Machines; network attacks; port scanning; packet sniffing; wireless encryption attacks; denial of service attacks and stress testing; operating systems attacks; buffer overflow attacks; chroot; Metasploit and Armitage; web application attacks; XSS; CSRF; SQLi; cookie poisoning; ClickJacking; Applied Cryptography; PGP/GPG; TrueCrypt; Bitlocker; Plausible Deniability; other topics (eg: Violent Python) as time permits. This course will have a strong emphasis on lab components.”
Confused? Don’t be! Professor Robert Olson, visiting instructor in the Computer Information Sciences department, Certified Ethical Hacker and only current professor of Ethical Hacking, explains:
“It’s a class where we teach people how to hack,” Olson laughs. “‘Ethical Hacking’ is defined as something called ‘penetration testing.’ The goal of a penetration tester is to break into a system, to see if he can do it. They’ve been hired to do it by the company, and the goal is to produce a report on whether it was successful, how they went about the hacking process, provide recommendations to fix the problems,” said Olson. “In some cases, penetration testers are required by companies such as credit card companies to make sure customer data is safe.”
Cyber security is a very important topic these days. It’s up in the top spots of the news, with headlines floating around about the Sony hack, the Apple iCloud security breach and more. Ethical Hacking as a class goes more in-depth. It answers the question, “how does someone hack something,” in order to create software that prevents it.
It requires a very high skill set, and a very high level of dedication. The class itself requires labs, homework assignments, a research paper and a final. It sounds like a normal class, except that students work can’t even be done on the campus servers — it has to be done in the Ethical Hacking lab, or off campus. Otherwise, the Fredonia servers will end up thinking they’re being hacked, and it’ll be interesting to have to explain to officials that you weren’t really hacking the school system — it was just for your homework assignment.
“It’s a heavy workload, and there’s a lot of things the students have to be very careful about,” Olsen said. “Students can never do their homework on the campus network. To do so would violate the computer use policy, which would result in a lot of negative consequences, like loss of network access, to expulsion or criminal charges. The first two days of lecture were all, ‘don’t do this!’”
This new class has excited the entire Computer Science Department, and Dr. Reneta Barneva, head of the department, thinks Olson is a good fit to teach such a new type of class.
“Professor Olson is an excellent instructor and the students greatly appreciate his teaching. He graduated from the Computer and Information Sciences Department about a decade ago and then got an interdisciplinary master’s degree from Fredonia in computer science and philosophy, which corresponded to his interests in artificial intelligence,” said Barneva. “Currently, Professor Olson’s scholarly interests are in social networks, computer security and ethics, and mobile programming. He offers courses in these fields and often involves undergraduates in his research activities.”