Hacker Highschool : Lesson 5, System Identification, is out

After some pretty serious downtime while I healed some broken bones, we’ve gotten Hacker Highschool v.2 rolling again with the release of Lesson 5 v.2, System Identification at
http://www.hackerhighschool.org/lessons.html.

We’re releasing lessons out of order as we can squeeze them through the review process, so some of the higher-number lessons are already out. Fact checking, code checking, technical review, and a lot of very painful and painstaking review for anything pasted from somewhere else is tricky. But writing to teens is trickier.

Bob Monroe (Hawaii Bob) is providing Game On sections for all the lessons. Since we’re targeting the 12-18 age group (think about the eons those years spanned in your own life), we’re trying to spread the appeal across several audiences. Game On, the stories of Jace the teen hacker, show hacking in action: the practical application of theory through adolescent eyes.

Also: the VM group helped us formalize onto VirtualBox VMs for our labs, with Fedora Security Spin soon to replace Backtrack as our attack machine, and target machines from the Fedora and Debian branches replacing Metasploitable. The guys who do Puppet configuration tell me we can massage our “victimstations” specifically for our Exercises, which is going to be a very sweet feature going forward.

So the pots are heating up behind the scenes, and a whole lot of things are coming to a boil. There’s plenty more to come.

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