Summer Internship at Bennett University
Summer internships give students a learning experience and an opportunity to showcase their potential. In this blog, I am going to tell how my summer internship went. I am Devansh Gupta, currently, a 4th-year student pursuing B.Tech in computer science engineering from Bennett University(Times of India group).
MICROSOFT CYBERSECURITY ENGAGE
My summer internship started by getting a chance to join the Microsoft cybersecurity engage program.
It was a great opportunity as it gave me hands-on experience which helped me to gain an interest in cybersecurity. The program was spread across 5 weeks with 23 sessions. There were live sessions held daily after which we were given an assignment that we had to submit within a given time frame. This program gave an opportunity to exchange ideas, interact, think and act on the scenarios where you have to deal with a cyber-attack. As the course started I learned about the basics of cybersecurity, reverse engineering, and computer forensics. As the sessions advanced I got to know about different types of malware and the effects they cause. I learned how different companies are using machine learning for different security trends.
Network scanning becomes an important aspect if we want to know what active devices are present on a network. This is done with the help of tools such as Wireshark. They taught me how to use Wireshark for monitoring our network to detect any unusuality. Apart from that, many other things were taught such as ssh configurations, use of python for exfiltration, command-control, impact, etc. At the end of the engage program, we were required to submit a research paper telling how to prevent a cyber attack in a particular scenario which was counted as our final project/submission. So this ended my Microsoft cybersecurity engage program.
ONLINE COURSES
Since I had more than a month left for my holidays, I decided to dive deeper into cybersecurity.
So I did a few courses on cybersecurity through which I came to know how to achieve privacy, anonymity, and isolation through the sandbox, virtual box, application isolation, VPN, proxy servers, and various other methods. I learned about various security features of different Operating systems like windows, mac, and Linux along with various encryption techniques.
Security vulnerabilities are the easiest way a hacker could hack into our systems. Therefore it becomes important to find them. From these courses, I got to know how to look for such vulnerabilities through network hacking and vulnerability scanning. Other things which I learned were authentication techniques as well as the configuration of firewalls on platforms like Windows, mac, and macOS to make them more secure from attacks. An interesting approach that I explored is anti-forensics, which teaches you how to delete the data and metadata securely so it becomes nearly impossible for even forensic experts to gain access to the deleted data. I also gained knowledge regarding the darknet and future techniques in cyber security. So this is what I learned through these courses.
After completing various cyber security courses my curiosity took me to ethical hacking.
So I started learning ethical hacking where I learned about different levels of phishing attacks, various types of scans and how to do them. For practicing these types of attacks I did set up my own hacking lab which consisted of a virtual machine through which I would practice and a vulnerable machine to practice my attacks onto. I studied the basics of network hacking such as pre-connection attacks, gaining access, and post-connection attacks. I even learned how to gain information regarding a target website (for eg — who is the owner of the website, the location of the server, and which technologies are used), etc, and how to find security vulnerabilities in them to make it easier for hacking it. Apart from this, I went through the usage of python in making ethical hacking apps.
So this is how my summer internship went. It was indeed an amazing time in which I learned various interesting things which would definitely help in the future.
Thank you.
