I wasn't aware I had to explain how the crypto works in order to advise my clients that they should be disabling outdated SSL versions on their servers and returing RC4 ciphers.
Evidently I don't have the brains for cybersecurity. My clients should be just fine with their telnet-enabled/remote-root-accessible servers until someone who can descramble Wingdings riddles can save them.
I have mixed feelings about this. While being a good puzzle solver is important, to be really good you need a certain level of creativity in thinking which goes beyond just the ability to solve puzzles. Thinking like a criminal as an example is a necessity in a number of cyber-security fields and can trump the ability to solve puzzles. I see a lot of vulnerabilities get marginalized because people simply can't correlate how it could be used by a criminal to make money. Likely for a reason, it's the ability to think like a criminal which is largely missing & where people do have that ability many times they are treated by their cyber security peers as a bit suspect.
If you enjoy this, maybe you will like the challenges of Hacking-Lab (https://www.hacking-lab.com).
Right now there's a Hacky Easter competition running which you can participate in for free: http://hackyeaster.hacking-lab.com/hackyeaster/challenges.ht...
This is probably a recruitment operation. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think that's what this is.
That's not "cybersecurity", that's paper and pencil cryptanalysis. Completely different skill.
Here's NSA's internal course list.[1] Not much about puzzles.
This might be the optimal place to start (Khan academy's excellent intro): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/crypt...
No[1], because "cybersecurity" is an open-ended non-static target, with human adversaries in the loop, who will adapt to circumstantial changes dynamically.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlinesI can't do one of these. It's the middle one of the last part. The diagram with the pentagon.
What's the point if they're just going to ask for backdoors in those systems later?
What area of 'cybersecurity' would I be finding myself breaking substitution ciphers based on wingdings in?
I work in the information security industry, and I feel like I'm missing something but I really have to ask what these are relevant to.
Cryptography, which this appears to be a reduced form of is mostly tangential and very nuanced relative to the ciphers in this challenge. I often feel my line of work is grossly misrepresented by dizzying fields of esoteric numbers and references to ancient cryptography when I'm happy to find myself many of my days engrossed in the security characteristics of some powerful technology used right now in the real world.
I moved from engineering to security, but if this was my only interaction with security, I'm not sure I'd have been interested.
Edit: if you're interested in real crypto challenges, try http://cryptopals.com/ and read Cryptography Engineering, which is a wonderful read that goes over not only the cryptography but also the principles common across the many specialisations of the infosec industry