The June school holidays is indeed a hectic month for me as I have many upcoming competitions and projects. Some of them includes the NSI (Network and Security Investigation) competition and the Singapore 2010 YOG (Youth Olympics Games) blogging competition. What’s more is that I would have to head back to school for several days to attend workshops and lessons for hours each time.
So what is the NSI competition all about? Well, it comprises of two challenges – Digital Forensic Investigation and Wireless Defense. Competitors will not be desk-bound, passively staring at computer screens. They can expect a high level of action, including moving around to find clues or secure devices, and high pressure scenarios that need intense discussion and analysis.
For the digital forensic investigation, competitors will be placed in a scenario where a computer crime has been committed. Students will apply forensically sound techniques to secure the crime scene and ensure that no evidence is disturbed or contaminated. They are then required to gather digital evidence from the hard disk drives. The evidence will be used to build a case against the suspect. Competitors will be judged on how well they secure the scene and gather digital evidence.
On the other hand, for the wireless defense, we will be the team employed to weed out rouge Access Points (APs) planted by reporters of tabloid magazines that have infiltrated the network. You will be required to build a long range antenna (cantenna) from scratch and use it together with a wireless sniffing utility to locate the rouge APs. Competitors will be judged based on the range of their cantenna and on the speed with which they locate the rouge APs.
It may sounds relatively quite easy for some of you especially the technologically-savvy ones and those working for CISCO or the FBI. But as students, we are not familiar with these stuff as we do not come hand in hand with these security issues in our daily lives. Just like any other teenagers, we care more about the virtual world (social networking websites) rather than racking our brains to find clues and evidence to a ‘hacking’ or kidnapping case. However, at least the construction of a cantenna is quite beneficial to us as we can use them to increase the range of (or snoop on) a wireless network
My partners and I have finished the building of our cantenna and it seems that it works quite well, detecting hundreds of rogue APs at one time. Although the construction of the cantenna (which was actually a spaghetti sauce can) looks pretty simple from the steps provided on the Internet, but we are not able to complete it all by ourselves as there was a lack of several important equipments. For example, without a soldering iron to solder the copper wire to the N type Female Chassis-mount connector and a drill to make a hole through the can. All thanks the helpful uncles at the electrical shop who have assisted us in most of our issues.
Well, here’s a video of our cantenna which is also part of the competition. You can get a peak of how we students work on our cantenna. Hope you will like it!
We hope we can win the competition as there fabulous prizes for the top 5 winners.
Champion:
• Acer NetBook each (Retail Price – S$ 600)
• S$ 300 voucher from Funan DigitaLife Mall each
• Symantec Norton 360 each
• Linksys Media Hub 305 (Retail Price – S$ 499) for school
1st Runner-up:
• Apple iPod Nano each (Retail Price – S$ 248)
• S$ 200 voucher each from Funan DigitaLife Mall
• Symantec Norton 360 each
• Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router (Retail Price – S$ 259) for school
2nd Runner-up:
• Apple iPod Shuffle each (Retail Price – S$ 128)
• S$ 100 voucher each from Funan DigitaLife Mall
• Symantec Norton 360 each
• Linksys Wireless-G Internet Home Monitoring Camera (Retail Price – S$ 199) for school
4th Prize:
• Symantec Norton 360 each
• Casio CW-50 CD Title Printer for school
5th Prize:
• Symantec Norton 360 each
• Casio CW-50 CD Title Printer for school
I will reveal whether we have won or not tomorrow on Twitter and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!