--Originally published at Mental Droppings of a Tired Student
Our second speaker had some big shoes to fill, spoiler alert: he didn’t make it.
Let’s start off with the positive aspects of his talk. I liked that he had material prepared and he does seem to have a good grasp on the concepts he touched on in his talk. The concepts were pretty standard for an introductory talk, such as phishing, malware, network attacks. He even demoed a fake Facebook login page used to obtain someone’s login information. He said you could send it as a URL to a photo and have the person click it and type in their login information, then it just redirects you to the real Facebook login.The only problem is you have to type in your information again, giving the victim of this attack a clue that something might be amiss.
I was surprised to see that he is a LIN student, and I applaud the fact that he is starting a business while still studying, I think David Noel would approve as well.
Now let’s talk about the negative aspects of the talk, which for me, ruined the entire thing. His quaint choice of analogy of comparing a network attack with courting women certainly made me raise an eyebrow. Frankly I consider it to be in very poor taste, it made me feel like I was listening to a pickup artist conference. He said something along the lines of “The goal is to attack her without her even realising she was attacked.” He was referring to a means to obtain a woman’s personal information in the midst of flirting with her. Inferring that a woman is something you can “hack” in order to obtain what you want, you know, like an object. Furthermore, injecting the word “attack” in that context is
Disclaimer, I’m not an uptight feminist or whatever, I usually brush this kind of ignorance aside, believe me I’ve been tolerant enough for the past four years and I’ve learned to deal with it. But for this blog’s sake, I decided to point that out.
While I can’t deny I understand what he meant, there are better examples for that concept. It’s sad that he thinks that is the best way to get a group of students to understand a concept, a rather simple one at that. He could have simply showed us the spoof Facebook page and moved on. Needless to say, I am not interested in attending his workshop, and if you’re a female I’d steer clear. You can learn that stuff on Coursera anyway.
