Crime and Computer Applications

Crime and Computer Applications is a class that teaches you about the ways that criminal attackers are able to perform their attacks and how you’re able to perform them yourself. You get to learn about cryptography and how it’s performed, the fundamentals of the activity, and how to perform it so that you can encrypt your own messages. You also get to learn about steganography, learning about the fundamentals of it, how it’s performed, and what you can do with it in the cyber forensics and cybersecurity field. An assignment that stood out to me the most was an assignment that was about steganography because it showed me how sneaky people can be with hiding programs and messages within documents and images. It required me to read about what it is and I found out that using invisible ink was also a way of steganography which really interested me. Reading about how steganography has been used throughout history greatly intrigued me because I didn’t think that it dated back as far as it did. I also got to use different programs, such as a github link that allowed me to encode messages into images and check how to read messages that were already encoded into images and word documents. 

A value that I learned from this is learning because I had no idea that this kind of stuff even existed until I started learning about cybersecurity. It certainly piqued my interest just knowing what things can be done with just images alone. It allowed me to learn more about this kind of objective because with the field I’m going into, I will definitely need to look out for this kind of thing when keeping emails and direct messages on applications safe. This will support my work in the field of cybersecurity because it will make me feel more aware when getting images from people over the internet and email. A value I learned from this assignment is fun because although people could use this for evil and deceit, you can also use it just to send funny messages to your friends. This will intersect with my personal goals because with friends, I would be able to send them a funny message to a friend and they wouldn’t even know about it, while also being able to send coworkers messages regarding important matters without others being able to get to it easily. The fact that this can be done for fun and for important matters can definitely be beneficial for a lot of different activities, especially ones such as capture the flag activities in schools and with competitions for cybersecurity and hacking divisions. A skill that I learned from this is attention to detail because when looking at images, it’s very hard to see if something looks different or off about it. Being able to keep an eye on certain details can definitely help me out in the cybersecurity field such as finding images that are the same, and finding out the sizes of the images that are altered as well as the same image online being different data sizes.

A list of artifacts that I can provide for this course would be images relating to steganography or encryption. I could also provide examples of my assignments that relate to the class, which I feel would be the best because I was given directions and links within the assignments to give a better understanding of what to do and how to perform them. The reason why the assignments are the best to post is because they give the reader more of an idea of how the class worked and what they’d be expecting if they were to go into college and attempt the same class. The audience will be able to use this information to go into the class and learn how to use the programs used in the class easier while also retaining the information better than if they were just learning about it.

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