Many cybersecurity tools are command line-based and it’s also very useful from a basic computer literacy standpoint to understand how to interact with computer systems using the command line. Many common computing tasks can also be handled much more quickly and efficiently from the command line. This lab teaches basic navigation of the filesystem, creation of subdirectories, copying and moving files, editing files using vim or emacs, sorting data, searching for keywords in files, and more. This is a very basic lab, although it will be revelatory for students who have never used the command line.

This lab explores some basic historical ciphers and also the use of modern cryptographic tools to encrypt and decrypt data. Most of these tools are command line-based, so it’s essential that students are familiar with using the Linux command line.

The purpose of this lab is to gain practical experience with password security—and insecurity. Students will use a powerful password cracking tool called John the Ripper to attempt to crack ZIP files encrypted with passwords of various strengths and to crack Unix (specifically, Linux) passwords.

The purpose of this lab is to gain some basic experience with social engineering tools. These are used in penetration testing (evaluating the security posture of an organization) as well as for attacks. Experience with how social engineering attacks are conducted will help students improve their own security posture.

In this lab, students conduct a personal security survey and explore some tools commonly used to discover social media accounts, physical locations, and vulnerable devices

The purpose of this lab is to gain some familiarity with tools that are commonly used to analyze computer networks. Students will learn to use nmap and zenmap to perform network scans and identify networked computers, what services they’re running, and other characteristics (such as which operating systems they’re running). First, you’ll use the command line tool and then the official GUI for the tool, which simplifies use of the frequently very complex options for nmap.

The purpose of this lab is to use common digital forensics tools to recover and examine digital evidence from a hard drive image (a copy of a hard drive recovered from a crime scene). Students will use tools such as fls, fsstat, and scalpel.

Students will use the memory forensics framework called Volatility to examine volatile evidence—that is, evidence that is not permanently stored on a hard drive and that exists in a computer’s memory. Memory forensics is now considered an essential tool for solving crimes involving digital devices because malware can exist only in memory. But the tools are still relatively complex to use. Because of this, the lab is set up as a walkthrough that lets the student mirror an experienced investigator’s steps

The purpose of this lab is to gain some practical experience with malware analysis. Students will use Strings and popular commercial sites such as Virus Total. An optional part of the lab, at the end, explores the source code of a short malware sample written by the authors of Cybersecurity in Context

In this lab, students will use some common tools for assessing the security of websites. This includes
scanning for hidden pages, enumerating subdomains, and performing some simple web exploitation exercises.

This lab focuses on two pervasive, poorly managed problems in cybersecurity: first, that
software engineers often fail to limit how users can input information into programs. The
“input validation” problem allows malicious users to craft inputs that result in unauthorized
execution of commands, bypassing authentication, etc., thereby undermining confidential-
ity, integrity, and availability. Second, “memory corruption vulnerabilities” allow malicious
users to cause software to misbehave, resulting in similar compromises to confidentiality,
integrity, and availability.