The best way to learn cyber skills is to put your hands on a keyboard and do something. There are many online sites where you can develop cyber skills through challenges. Most sites where you do cyber challenges, such as Hack This Site which is what we are using, have their challenges posted on YouTube in very simple walkthroughs, and you can zip to the end for the answer. This does not help teach anything.
The GenCyber Experience is an opportunity for area students in grades 6-8 and 9-12 to learn about cybersecurity and its careers through hands-on experience with real-world tools and problems. As a Cyber Ambassador, it is my job to teach the children that come to the experience. We used hackthissite.org for one week and Ceaser ciphers and Kali Linux the other to teach about cybersecurity
As prep work for the Cyber Saturday events, we were given three challenges from the basic level from hackthissite.org to create a walkthrough for. Instead of walking through the problem steps and giving away the answer, we were tasked to figure out what someone needed to know in order to solve it. The goal is to combine all of our work and develop a training module that the Center for Cybersecurity can use for Gen Cyber events.
During the other week of the GenCyber Experience, we began with a Kali Linux lab to teach the groups about penetration testing and the tools you use to complete the test. After this lab, we went over encryption and decryption using a cipher wheel. The wheel was a great way to show how a Caesar cipher works. Once you have your message, you can turn the outer wheel the determined shift count and compare each letter of your message in the inner wheel to the corresponding letter of the outer wheel to give you your decrypted message
Through these Saturdays, I was able to learn new things about cybersecurity, as we have never used HTML or a website at all for anything related to cybersecurity. While creating the PowerPoints, I was furthering my understanding because I had to simplify the terms into something middle and high schoolers could understand. The best way to learn something better is to teach it; that is exactly what I am doing through these events.