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Ask HN: Resources for College Cybersecurity Club?

by _z2co on 8/27/23, 2:19 PM with 11 comments

Hi! I run a club at my university devoted to helping ~30 members learn more about hacking and cybersecurity, and I'd love to get more suggestions for activities we can do on a shoestring budget.

What free/cheap interactive tutorials and lessons have you enjoyed?

So far, I plan to:

- Work through the Bandit box on OverTheWire.org [1]

- Talk about social engineering with the Social Engineer Toolkit [2]

- Practice CTFs with PicoCTF [3]

- ... hack the planet?

[1] https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

[2] https://github.com/trustedsec/social-engineer-toolkit

[3] https://picoctf.org/

  • by sargstuff on 8/27/23, 3:39 PM

    Cybersecurity Educational Resources : https://github.com/CSIRT-MU/edu-resources

    Web search / check out what other college cyber security clubs / national organizations are using/doing//hosting!

    Affiliating a club with a national parent organization(s) may also provide additional resources.

    a few links from sites via "cyber security club activities" web search:

       https://www.cyber-fasttrack.org/cyber-collegiate/
   https://nationalcyberleague.org/
   https://www.sans.org/mlp/cybersecurity-training-community/

  • by hayst4ck on 8/28/23, 10:28 PM

    Could you talk a bit more about your university, your club, the goals of this club, and the type of people showing up to the club? A university is a different place than a community college. A university with a quality CS program is a different place than a university without one. People from technical programs (using tools) can be very different than those in a science/engineering program (writing tools).

    Security before this class (or a similar class): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~213/ is a very very different beast than security after it.

    Red teaming is different than blue teaming. Defense is a nearly entirely different way of looking at security than offense.

    Reverse engineering/binary exploitation is a fairly different skill set than web exploitation.

    Is your goal to participate in competitions or just to be in a better position to get higher paying jobs?

  • by more_corn on 8/27/23, 7:11 PM

    I knew a guy who swore by hack the box https://www.hackthebox.com/

    Flan scan is a pretty good tool to play around with.

  • by BinaryBuddha on 8/28/23, 8:23 PM

    Check out AccessCyber.co + and reach out if you would like to set up an AccessCyber Chapter at your university/ college. Thanks!

  • by nosmokewhereiam on 8/27/23, 2:50 PM

    Cyber guardian program and maybe check out isc.sans.org.

  • by commandersaki on 8/27/23, 10:22 PM

  • by 0xE1337DAD on 8/27/23, 10:01 PM

    Tryhackme.com has been the best resource for me.