There's an article on Newsweek about a controversial computer security curriculum at Sonoma State University. Professor George Ledin is teaching his students how to create malware such as spam bots and viruses. In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including ...

From Newsweek: College Teacher Shows Students How to Be Hackers. Ledin compares the companies' hold over antivirus technology (under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the companies' codes are kept secret) to cryptography decades ago, when the new science of scrambling data was largely controlled by the National Security Agency. [. . .] Why should we shy away from learning something that is important to everyone?," Ledin asks. "Yes, ...

IST students were sent an email recently announcing a new job posting system and the dismantling of ISTechTRAK. Despite the awkward name, ISTechTRAK worked fairly well and played an indirect role in landing each of my internships. It also had room for improvement, which I won't address here nor speculation on its replacement. My interest was piqued by the opaqueness of the message. The turnover of the system is ...

Umair Haque, a well noted new media 'thought leader,' wrote an interesting post a few days ago (which was going to be a speech) titled 'A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. Umair, a revolutionary at heart, calls for a 21st century revolution in the DNA of the way we do business. In an excerpt from his conclusion, it's clear Umair is passionate and has a few powerful things to ...

There's an interesting discussion going on at Scout.com with insightful statements given by IST alumni. They talk about what an IST degree is worth, which is a mildly controversial topic among current students. I've heard playful phrases such as "You can't spell bullshit without IST" or "IST stands for I'm Self Taught." This forum thread takes this to the next level by offering real stories from our alumni. ...

A blog is not a forum. Both accept reader opinions, but forums require registration and blogs do not. ISTBuilding.com has two forums. Since last jumping my feed reader to comment, this website implemented Disqus-based comments enabling threading and registration. Personally, I think comment threading is counter-intuitive and unnecessary, but I don't really have any quibbles with implementing it here. Registration is a deal breaker. First, let's not be confused. The ...

Today, six Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) Club members and myself attended the first day of the 2nd Annual National Security Analysis and Risk Management Conference hosted by SARMA and George Mason Law School's Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program. My intentions are not to summarize the speakers events, but they are instead to share specific points. As Matt wrote in his previous post, SARMA is an acronym for ...

I just dropped by the Mac Lab at IST 205 and discovered a sexy new issue of the Magazine of IST. MIST, led by Brad Shively (President) and Joe Lewis (VP), finally released a print issue for this academic year. My first impression was that the magazine looks awesome. It is printed on semi-glossy paper in full color, which must have cost the club a pretty penny. I didn't ...

I've been seeing more and more IST students jumping onto Twitter recently (I won't name them here but you can find some of them on my "following" list). Twitter is essentially a "microblogging" platform, and it can be described as a unique combination of the following elements: social network + blogging + away message + instant messaging + email + feed reader. If you're not familiar with it, ...

This is part three in a four-part series about the College of IST. Part 1, Part 2. You know that IST students are more crafty when it comes to file sharing, but you don't have to walk on the dark side to get your hands on some free intellectual property. That means you don't have to search the seedy areas of the Internet for Microsoft software. Through a partnership ...