Andrew Kennedy

I have completed many assignments and projects throughout my time at the University of South Florida. Many of these assignments shaped my learning process and defined what information I would retain after my time here was over. Throughout all of the assignments I’ve completed, a couple stand above the rest as examples of well-crafted learning exercises. These assignments deepened my understanding within their respective focuses and helped me understand the material through real experiences. In this assignment I will be speaking about two assignments that Stood out to me while pursuing my bachelor’s in science here at USF. These assignments were setting up and running my Kali machine to attack two other virtual machines in my ethical hacking class and downloading and running Wireshark on my home Wi-Fi network to monitor a three-way handshake in my networking class.
CIS 4204 Ethical Hacking was one of my most enjoyable classes through my entire pursuit at USF. This class saw me setting up three virtual machines, a Kali attack machine and two different vulnerable machines running different operating systems. The set-up assignment was enjoyable where we set the three machines up and linked them all together so they could interact with one another. However, the most memorable assignment from this class was when we ran password cracking tools on the vulnerable Linux machine to access filed that were supposed to be secured. This was a surprisingly easy process and taught me that a large portion of hackers are using these tools with a rudimentary understanding of the software, they don’t need to know how to code this hacking software, they only need to know how to download and run it on a vulnerable system.
LIS 4482 Networks and Communication was much less interactive. This class was mostly bookwork and sometimes it can be hard to translate bookwork to the real world. That is one of the reasons I loved the final project so much. This project saw us downloading Wireshark and using it on our home network. Wireshark is monitoring software, and we had been learning about information transmission and how a three way handshake works when accessing a network. Basically, when your computer accesses a website like Yahoo it first needs to make sure the Yahoo server has enough room on the server to allow your computer to access the webpage. This is done through a three-way handshake. First your computer asks if the server has room, next the yahoo responds with a yes or no, finally your computer acknowledges the response and accesses the webpage. However, this gets interesting when monitoring it through Wireshark. Initially there are so many transmissions going back and forth over the network that it is impossible to decipher anything. But once you know the IP addresses you are working with it becomes much more manageable. By isolating the transmissions to only that of your computer then things become clear. You then sift through these transmissions for a string of communication with the same outgoing IP address and you can find the three-way handshake for whatever webpage you were accessing on your computer. It was a fascinating and informative assignment that really helped me understand the process of multiple different computer processes.
In conclusion, these assignments helped me drastically in my understanding of the material designated by USF. With the help of these classes my foundational understanding of these materials will aid me in any future computer science field I focus on.