Guest Speakers:

Dr. John Sands

Dr. John Sands is a member of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, a nonprofit organization specializing in training and certifying cybersecurity professionals. He holds the Certified Information Systems Security Professional certification.

You can read more about Dr. John Sands here!

Jesse Hairston

Jesse is a research scientist with UAH’s Center for Cybersecurity Research and Education, who received the Educator of the Year award from Cyber Huntsville at this year’s National Cyber Summit! The award recognizes his work on developing cybersecurity camps for students and teachers.

You can read more about Jesse Hairston here and here!

Cyber Bytes: Facebook Data Breach

The personal information of 533 million Facebook users has reemerged online for free on Saturday, April 3rd to an online forum for hackers. Data such as phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, locations, birth dates, jobs, gender information, and even email addresses has been leaked from 106 countries. While this data breach has already been reported in August 2019 and Facebook has since then created a fix for the vulnerability that exposed this data, it was revealed on April 3rd that all of this data is now free to access on the internet by anyone.

Alon Gal, the chief technology officer of cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock discovered this leaked data in January 2020 when a user in the hacking forum advertised an automated Telegram bot that people could use to find phone numbers of Facebook users at a price. While these databases of personal data aren’t shared publicly right away, as those who have access to the database will work to monetize it as much as they can, Gal states that “eventually all private databases leak if they were sold around”. 

Although this is personal data from a couple years ago, it’s not likely for peoples’ phone numbers or email addresses to change overtime, so cybercriminals could still use this data to their advantage – such as impersonating people or using social engineering tactics to gain login credentials. Facebook will not notify all the individual users who have been impacted, so many sites are recommending https://haveibeenpwned.com/, where you can enter your email address into their database and find out if your email has been compromised. HaveIBeenPwned also provides a password search, where users can find out if their password has been exposed for hackers to use. 

As it seems that new data breach stories are being reported on every week, this is a good reminder for everyone to follow strong password policies. Having complex passwords, changing up your passwords every so often, using multi-factor authentication and password manager, are all safe practices that we should utilize to protect ourselves from potentially becoming the victims of future data breaches. 

Resources

• Creating Strong Passwords: https://www.howtogeek.com/195430/how-to-create-a-strong-password-and-remember-it/ 
• Multi-factor Authentication: https://www.nist.gov/itl/applied-cybersecurity/tig/back-basics-multi-factor-authentication
• What is a Password Manager?: https://cybernews.com/best-password-managers/how-do-password-managers-work/

Technology Corner – Ethical Hacking

Hey gamers welcome back to the technology corner. So for this show I have the honor of doing a walkthrough of an Ethical Hacking exam from mirror learning which will be quite fun. The only problem is that we don’t know much about ethical hacking or the tools associated with it, which is why for the first part of the segment I go over slides to give an overview about what the exam is about and what we can expect. The second half I actually do a complete walkthrough of the exam so this is what I recommend, you read the slides and try to do the exam. If you get stuck you can use my video to get you back on track.

Here is the link for the slide and here is the link to the activity 🙂

Resources:

• GHDB
• What is GHDB?
• What is a MAC address?
• How to find MAC address on your computer
• Rumkin

Cyber Opportunities

CyberStart America

• Compete in a two day competition to gain a free scholarship that can be used at any regionally accredited college to continue your education in cybersecurity.
• Other prizes are included in the National Cyber Scholarship Competition. You can find more information on their website which is https://www.cyberstartamerica.org/

US Cyber Challenge

• The US challenge provides a summer camp for US citizens only that compete in their quest competition. The camp schedule is for the east coast it is from June 7th to June 11th and for the west coast it is July 12th to July 16th. You can find more information on their website which is https://www.uscyberchallenge.org/cyber-camps