Linux System for Cybersecurity

This course aimed to creating proficiency in navigating and operating within the Linux Operating system through a cybersecurity lens. While it covered basic operations, such as working with the command line, the course also covered things such as file system management and user authentication, helping to directly correlate Linux operations with cybersecurity.

One assignment that I think integrates Linux basics with cybersecurity operations is the password cracking assignment. To do this assignment, I created multiple users with passwords of various difficulties, then I used JohnTheRipper to find the passwords. With the limited time I allowed JohnTheRipper to run, the result of the assignment shows how fast the tool can crack “easy” passwords compared to the more “complex” passwords.

Reflection: I think adding this assignment also shows the range of complexity to password cracking I have tackled over time. I did a similar assignment in a later class that was more complicated than this one, but they both share the same overall concepts. This assignment, and the class overall, helped me to build my capabilities over the course of my college career.

During this class, I also learned about user and group permissions, which I think coincides with the later file permissions assignment. For this assignment, we had to create a user, a password for that user, and define the permissions for the user before adding it to a group.

The file permissions assignment required me to make multiple group and user accounts and assign each account with different levels of permissions. Then, to check that the permissions were done correctly, I proceeded to log into the accounts and check the files that were sensitive to the permissions