Hello there! If you have opened this page, then give yourself a pat on the back because you are now on your first step to learning more about cybersecurity :D
If you are completely new to cybersecurity and what it entails, do not fret! As mentioned, the pre-training package aims to give you a fundamental understanding of certain cybersecurity package. This means that after you finish this course, you should have some basic knowledge of common topics and concepts found in cybersecurity such as networking, forensics and cryptography.
If you have some experience, we hope that this course can serve as a refresher! Reviewing your knowledge is always a good thing to do. You might even pick up on something that you didn’t know before!
In a few words, cybersecurity is the protection of networks, devices, programs and data against cyber attacks and threats. Of course, there is much more to cybersecurity than what was mentioned. You will learn more about it as you go through the pre-training package and our workshops.
The best way to protect yourself is to know your vulnerabilities and how they are exploited. This is the same in the field of cybersecurity. As such, this means that we will be teaching about various vulnerabilities and exploits for the sake of knowing weaknesses and how we can avoid or patch them.
As such, before moving on, it is important that we state that:
THE INFORMATION YOU LEARN SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR ANY MALICIOUS INTENTS AND PURPOSES, OR ATTEMPTED CYBER ATTACKS.
In other words, make sure that you only take part in ethical hacking - or hacking with legal permission. This means that whatever vulnerabilities you exploit should WITH PERMISSION, for the intent of resolving those vulnerabilities.
(please don't actually hack your school servers)
What’s now is… CTFs!
CTFs stand for “Capture-the-flag”. While you may not know what exactly it entails, we hope that you at least know that Whitehacks is a CTF competition :D
CTFs are a gamified cybersecurity competition format, where you solve different challenges for “flags”, or an answer of sorts!
They are a fun way of developing cybersecurity skill sets, as well as to reinforce and learn more new knowledge on hacking and cybersecurity concepts.
Something important to note is that CTFs are not a realistic overview of day-to-day work that cybersecurity professionals do. As mentioned, they are meant to be a fun way of testing your knowledge and skills that you possess.
More details on CTFs will be covered further in the course.