Joe Jabara doesn't call his class Hacking 101, but his students do learn how to develop effective attacks on computer systems.
The course is actually called Applied Computing Intermediate Design Project, and this past spring its students carried out phishing attempts against a targeted group of Wichita State faculty, staff and students.
Working in teams, students created emails based on the same principles that hackers use to get recipients to open an email, click on a link and enter log in credentials. Student efforts were successful: Out of 128 targets, 40 opened a phishing email, 10 clicked on a link and four entered log in credentials.
"While the exercise didn't go so far as to infect the network or steal credentials, it gave the students baseline data as to what type of emails succeed in fooling the user," said Jabara, director of the College of Engineering's Hub for Cybersecurity Education and Awareness.
