Cyber Attacks: First Google then You?

Neale Pickett, Los Alamos National Laboratory
 

Corbin couldn't understand why everybody snickered as he walked to third period Geography. He was pretty sure it wasn't anything he was wearing: he'd checked his fly (zipped), hair (spiked), and jacket (no signs taped on it). And anyway, nobody seemed to care much during first or second period. What was going on?
 
Walking into the classroom full of whispers and giggles, his friend Beto shot him a worried glance. "Dude." Beto handed Corbin his phone, showing Corbin's Facebook photos page. On it were some scans of papers, but he hadn't uploaded any scans. He opened one of them, and his heart sank as he read the details of his trip to the doctor last week. He'd told everyone he had the flu, but didn't think it was necessary to mention the explosive diarrhea. But here it was, in the doctor's report, on his Facebook page. 280 people liked this.
 
Myspace, Google, Twitter, Exxon-Mobil, VISA: all of these companies have had computer security incidents recently. Yes, even LANL and Sandia. As more and more details of our lives move onto computers, computer security becomes increasingly important. Cybersecurity is one of the only professions that has continued to grow through the recession, partially because of public situations like Corbin's doctor's office network being hacked and his Facebook password getting stolen.
 
This presentation will put you in the role of computer hacker or defender. You'll break encryption codes, hack web applications, and program tanks to blow each other up, and it will all be legal! In learning these skills, you'll start to get an idea about what computer security is all about: what sorts of attacks happen on the Internet and how to prevent them; how easy it can be to break things; and why "security through obscurity"--like typing a letter using wingdings--isn't enough.
 

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