Students’ Affair Is to Be Cyber Aware

Education Cybersecurity Weekly is a curated weekly news overview for those who are concerned about the Education industry. It provides brief summaries and links to articles and news across a spectrum of cybersecurity and technology topics that are specific to the industry.

Students of 16 British universities are at risk of scamming

Forbes on November 17, 2018

The UK tax authority, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), has warned students to be careful while parsing emails – HMRC has received thousands of reports of phishing emails in recent weeks.

The fraudulent methodology remains quite the same – the emails come from the university itself and inform its students that they are entitled to a tax refund. In order to claim it, they are asked to follow a link to what purports to be a gov.uk website for HMRC where personal and banking details are required to facilitate the transfer of money owing.

“Although HMRC is cracking down hard on internet scams, criminals will stop at nothing to steal personal information” Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mel Stride MP, said in a statement, “I’d encourage all students to become phishing aware – it could save you a lot of money.”

To stop a hacker, think like a hacker!

The New York Times on November 14, 2018

Let’s begin with some statistics. Between September 2017 and August 2018, the U.S. employers posted nearly 315,000 job openings for cybersecurity professionals. With new technologies, making cybersecurity field more complicated, data protection requires a new approach to the educational process in training the specialists.

Nowadays, many jobs involve testing the security of software programs, computer networks, hardware devices and determination of vulnerabilities that hackers may use for malicious purposes. To anticipate attackers’ actions, students should be able to think like cybercriminals. The security technologist Bruce Schneier emphasized that the key feature of this process is the ability to instinctively identify the ways of subverting or compromising systems by using them in unexpected ways.”

However, the psychological characteristics of students, who regularly attend classes and carefully outline the lectures, do not correlate with thinking like cybercriminals. “It’s far easier to teach someone domain expertise — cryptography or software security or safecracking or document forgery — than it is to teach someone a security mind-set,” says Schneier.

Brooklyn school seniors protested against self-directed learning

Edscoop on November 14, 2018

Actually, the reason of the protest is quite noteworthy. Nearly 100 students at the Secondary School of Journalism in Brooklyn walked out over the implementation of the Summit Learning program, a self-directed learning curriculum on the personalized digital platform.

The learning model implies self-directing of students’ learning, collaborating on a project together or working one-on-one with a faculty or administrative mentor. The teacher’s role is to monitor the progress of learners and to help them master a particular area. The walkout organizer is Kelly Hernandez, a 17-year old student, said: “It was bad enough that we were lost, the teachers were lost. We have done absolutely nothing in that class.” Furthermore, the implementation of this program met obstacles such as the lack of laptops and poor Wi-Fi connection.

They “Captured the Flag” and tried hacking tools – engaging students in cybersecurity

NPG of Idaho on November 15, 2018

The learning process can be interesting, especially when it comes to training cybersecurity skills. District 91 Career-Technical Education students were given a task to play a cyber version of “Capture the Flag” during their visit to the University of Idaho’s campus.

The teens answered quiz questions, solved cryptography, translated phrases from Latin to English, and more. Organizers emphasized that getting an intro to the concepts, tasks and tools can encourage students to study cybersecurity further in the future and to develop essential skills even if their future job won’t be directly connected with data protection.

Talking about educational process, Michael Haney, the assistant professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, claimed: “It’s difficult to understand how to do cybersecurity if you don’t have some experience hacking stuff. You have to give seniors a safe place to go and play around, where they’re not going to have problems down the line.”