Reflection Paper 2

Before I came to this class, I have no experience with hacking and how does computer work. I am a marketing major who wanted to study cyber, but I was scared to fail the major. I was told that colleges are not very easy, so I need to study hard to pass classes and maintain my GPA. Unfortunately, someone recommended me to choose an easy major that I like so I can pass the college because I am already late to having a college degree. I swear since I was a child, I watched movies of people hacking into a system and solve the company’s problems and I was amazed how could they do that! When I came to Maryville I heard about cybersecurity, but my main goal is to graduate to get a job. Since I had this class, I already fall in love with cybersecurity so I went to my advisor and I asked about having a double major for cybersecurity and she to told me that I can get a second degree of cybersecurity as a double major. Now, I am aiming to finish my double major no matter what it takes. 

To be honest, this class taught me from the zero and kind of gave me one or two info from each field of cybersecurity. For instance, what is the OS? I did not know what that means at that time. Now I know that the operating system is software that is able to control the physical components of a computer which is “Hardware”. What is a virtual machine manager? It is called a hypervisor which is a type of software that allows us to run more than one operating system within an existing operating system. The benefits of VM are trying a new operating system, testing applications, running old applications, etc. However, VM cannot be having RAM larger than the host. So many things I learned from this class which I was wondering before for example, what does it happen behind the screen when we double click in any application e.g. Adobe? It talks to the Kernel, and that communication is called, “The system call” but sometimes it takes time to open because the system call did what it supposed to do but the kernel only allocated enough or minimum type of resources to launch the app to be configured.

A lot of things we covered in this course like OS hardening, software codes like Java, digital signature, Internet Explorer, services like SMTP, DNS, DHTP. In order to for a server to pull an IP address, it has to have DHTP enabled. That means via port 67 and 68 to communicate with DHTP server in order to assign it the box. What is keylogger? It can be used for ligament purposes like record any entrees inputs, organizations use to check espionage, and to track employees' behaviors. Also, what is proxy? It is like an intermediate device between the user and the webserver. It keeps hackers anonymous because it hide the IP address of a hacker and only the proxy's IP can be seen. Proxy cannot encrypt data as hacker surf the internet this where VPN comes in. It hides hacker's IP and encrypt the data that sent and received between the device and the internet.

I like how in the first class the professor started from zero and asked what is OS? To test the students’ level of knowledge. I was afraid this course would jump to a higher level since we only have two months for this course. Although sometimes we jump back and forth to cover the course, so I had to go home and study the slides, but the problem is the slide did not show up in canvas until we finish taking the lecture and the test. I kindly disagree with it because that did not help me follow up with the lectures and participate with the students. Also, if it was in canvas before we take the online test, it will be very helpful for us. However, some questions in the test are based on the lectures which I see it is difficult to remember what we learned in the lecture to answer a specific question.

In this class, we did not only learn about operating system but also how were cybersecurity used? For example, Stuxnet the first cyberweapon created by United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear program to target the windows OS controlling the PLC which control the central fuse.