Advent of Code, Final Fantacy Quirks, and Automotive Cyber Security Talk

Thanks to everyone who attended HackNotts2020 over the weekend. Coming up in December we have a talk on the Quirks of the Final Fantasy games, and a talk on Automotive Cyber Security.

Advent of Code

In the run up to Christmas there is a series of programming challenged known as the Advent of Code. These are small challenges that should only take a short time to complete (though the later ones can take a little longer), and are a great way of testing and improving your programming skills.

You can join the HackSoc private leaderboard by putting the following code into the leaderboard page of the website.

216440-b64023a2

Join in at adventofcode.com

Upcoming Events

Our events run at 7pm and run on our Discord or via Zoom. For events running on Zoom you can join with the button below.

Final[Fantasy] -> Quirks

Coming up on Tuesday the 1st of December at 7pm on Zoom we have a talk from HackSoc's own Alexi and Leanne on the technical quirks of the Final Fantasy series of video games.

From speedrunners to lore nerds and all sorts in between push and break games, taking them to pieces to see how they work. Join Alexi and Leanne on a journey through the bugs and exploits that the Final Fantasy community have found and dive into the code and design to see how they work and what lead to these game breaking exploits shipping.

Automotive Cyber Security - A talk by Aileen Ryan

Coming up on Tuesday the 8th of December at 7pm on Zoom we have a talk from Aileen Ryan on Automotive Cyber Security.

In the era of connected and autonomous vehicles, the topic of cyber security has become critically important for road vehicles. Every top-selling make of new car in 2020 has safety-critical components connected directly to the Internet and autonomy will further increase the significance of these connections. Automotive-related hacks have nearly doubled every year since 2016 and 82% of those did not require physical access to a vehicle. Real-life attacks remain rare for now, but in future a successful attacker could remotely steal a truck, crash a car or even bring a city to a standstill, risking lives on an unprecedented scale.

This presentation discusses the challenges faced by the automotive industry in the light of increasing cyber risk and offers practical strategies for addressing them, based on the latest cutting-edge research. It will focus in particular on Embedded Analytics – a highly innovative approach, putting intelligent monitoring and analytics infrastructure into the core hardware of a System on Chip (SoC), to engineer and assure resilience. This new engineering approach increases the likelihood of detecting and responding safely to threats that were not known when the vehicle was designed – and is increasingly being deployed in safety- and security-critical systems

Aileen’s executive career spans software engineering, operations and strategy with a variety of firms including Huawei, TM Forum, Motorola and Alcatel. She is widely recognized as a leader in the global communications industry and has been named by Silicon Republic as one of the top 25 Irish leaders in the Sci-Tech world. Aileen serves on the editorial advisory board for VanillaPlus and IOTNow publications, and is a regular speaker and moderator at events globally. Aileen holds an M.B.A., an M.Sc. in Computer Science, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical & Micro-electronic Engineering from University College Cork.

Every Friday at 7pm we have our Cyber Security Workshops over on Zoom.

During this week's workshop you will have another opportunity to practice going through the process of gaining full control over a vulnerable server hosted on the tryhackme platform. Come along to learn some new valuable skills whilst also gaining an insight into how you can make your own projects more secure. No previous experience of programming or cyber security is required. It would be helpful however if you could install Kali Linux on a virtual machine before the workshop, if you have any problems doing this you could drop a message in the cyber security channel on the HackSoc discord or I can try and help during the workshop. A good tutorial for installing the virtual machine is here.

So whether you are a seasoned hacker, or just interested, be sure to come along.

Opportunities

University Radio Nottingham

Are you interested in working with University Radio Nottingham, UoNSU's award winning radio station? Having just gotten a new studio they are looking for people to get involved and join their tech team, working on exciting projects such as rolling out a new website, and a mobile app to allow people to listen on the go.

If you're interested just drop an email to [email protected]

Join our Discord

The HackSoc Discord is the place to be this year. It is where you can chat about tech, or anything else, as well as where you can find out the latest information about our upcoming events.