Hacking bank cards, cars and instant messengers and other features of education at the best magistracy in the Netherlands
Hello! My name is Marat Nigmatullin. I am a student at Innopolis University , which prepares information technology specialists. The university actively cooperates with partner universities from among the best universities in the world in order to adapt best practices. Now I’m at one of these, at the University of Amsterdam, and I study under the System and Network Engineering program. Starting from the next academic year, this program will be offered by the Innopolis University itself. The story I want to tell is quite simple, but no less interesting. The nuances of studying abroad, the similarity of the Dutch and Russian languages, interesting practical tasks, the university ethics commission and many more other details under the cat.
I studied at the Kazan Federal University at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Information Technologies, VMK. Before I entered Innopolis University, I managed to get industrial experience at DLS , where I worked for 2 years.
I have to say that it was very difficult to act. TOEFL I passed only the second time. Therefore, my advice to all who undertake this, do not repeat my mistakes. I was preparing for the exam for 3 months, which was clearly not enough. Lay on the preparation of more time, much more. In the speech part of the test I was especially helped by the practice of traveling abroad (Work and Travel) and communicating there with different people exclusively in English. Nevertheless, all the difficult exams, all the obstacles that I had overcome on the way to my goal, were worth it. Now I feel pleasure and great interest from studies and from teachers.
')
It is worth noting that the System and Network Engineering program has a very high intensity: the teacher gives the material and immediately after the lectures practical classes begin. Moreover, the tasks are directly related to the lecture material and all this goes in parallel. In the practical part, you can spend as much time as you need. Before the exam, professors check the practical task and, if the student, in their opinion, coped with the task and did it well, admits it to the exam. If a student has completed the task incorrectly, he receives feedback with a list of tasks to be corrected. But it must be borne in mind that even after the correction, the task may again be performed incorrectly. In this case, the teacher, first of all, looks at the thinking of the student. There are cases that the student did the assignment wrong, but the teacher, considering the time spent on the assignment, and taking into account the ways and ways of thinking, still allows for the exam.
One of the subjects that we study is called “Network and System Security” . The teacher constantly invites different companies to the university so that they give lectures for students and give some practical task. One of these tasks that business representatives brought with them was to try to break into a seemingly normal bank card. We needed to understand the technology (mechanism) of card hacking and how it is done in real companies. Because manufacturers of world-famous bank cards very often hold events in which different companies are trying to break into their new system of protecting electronic payment documents.
Well, now it's time to talk about the fundamental differences between education in Europe and Russian education. The main thing is a large amount of time allotted to the practice, and motivating the presentation of information. All teachers are real enthusiasts of their field: they find a way to each student and give a strong zeal to study the subject.
At the University of Amsterdam, I have already studied 4 subjects: the necessary skills, classic Internet applications, the security of networks and systems, and distributed systems. The most favorite was the subject of "classic Internet applications." Teaches him the program director of the System and Network Engineering Karst Coymans. Why do I highlight it? He talks about the things that happen in everyday life that will be useful to you in the future. In addition, he gives the necessary material, he is fascinating to talk about each individual technology, its advantages and disadvantages, the specific problems faced by large corporations.
We only study in English, and in everyday life everyone speaks Dutch, which at first caused me discomfort. But after immersion in the educational process, it faded into the background.
I live in a student campus (photo) in a room that looks more like an apartment, with all the necessary living conditions. The campus itself is located 5 minutes walk from the University, which helps me significantly save on transport. A small number of people live in this area of Amsterdam, which I really like. I eat in the university canteen: lunch, dinner. I cook breakfast myself. There are 40 people in our group and only 5 students came from abroad: I am from Russia, an American, a British, a Pole and a girl from Italy.
Part of my expenses were paid for with the Global Education grant, so anyone who wants to cut a bone should pay close attention to it.
Just want to say that at the University of Amsterdam, this is not called a thesis, but a research project. We have two such projects in total, the topics for which you decide for yourself or choose from the list of available ones provided by the university.
Already, in January, I will have the first research project on how large corporations and application developers use various methods and FrameWork to check the phone for root / jailbreak. One of the clearest examples of such projects at the university is the work of one of the students, who last year hacked a car of a famous brand using the automaker's mobile application, which is freely available in the app store and play market. He spent the whole month on this project. The main difficulties of his work lay in the fact that, in addition to hacking the car system, there are also ethical frameworks of projects: that is, the student must put forward a proposal for a specific project to the ethics committee of the university. He must give certain guarantees that only his private car will be subjected to hacking and strangers will not be involved. Also, this university body must provide a full list of actions that you are going to take in the project.
My own work, on which I had been working for the last few months, was based on working with the server, which is located at the University of Amsterdam. It has a special fee, with which you can control it remotely: turn it on, turn it off, etc. The task of my project was to crack the board and determine how resistant it is to hacker attacks and external influences. In this case, we used a number of techniques: we opened the server, studied how the board worked, how it works, used the brute force method, prepared the environment in advance, disconnecting our servers from the Internet to leave access to them only for us. After that, we found some vulnerabilities, having established that it is possible during authorization to send a command that would allow access to this board for attackers.
Also, an interesting project is being developed by my classmates, who were mainly focused on hacking a well-known messenger through a web application and searching for a system vulnerability . As it turned out, this version of the famous program, adapted for browsers, does not have any special security holes, but the guys did manage to detect certain problems. They connected all the phones and one computer at hand to one WI-FI point to monitor traffic and exchanged pictures using phones, examining data packets. The guys found that in each package there is a link to the file being transferred. That is, they could just copy this link, redirect to the computer and completely free to open the image on the screen or any other device. Therefore, by connecting to any public WI-FI access point, you can potentially track all links to files that are transferred using an instant messenger in this area, which is quite a serious problem. For all of us, this was a strange surprise.
From interesting things about myself in everyday life, I found that many words in Dutch and Russian have the same meaning. Suppose a crane: in both Russian and the language of the country of tulips, the word has two meanings at once - water and construction. Tea in Dutch will be the same as ours - tea.
Unfortunately or fortunately, there is simply no time left for extracurricular activity. I spend about 40-50 hours to study a week, but, in principle, everyone decides for himself how much time to devote to his studies. Someone gets the problem to solve faster, and someone in the study help skills acquired earlier. But then we just travel all over Europe. For example, we went to Paris with a group.
Now I am starting work on my own project at Deloitte , headquartered in Amsterdam. The organization itself is engaged in activities in various fields, one of which is information security. In the next part, I will try to tell in detail about this work and what else impressed and amazed me at the University of Amsterdam, and come back with a new batch of interesting nuances about getting education abroad.
For everyone who wants to learn modern information technologies, I want to say: go ahead and succeed! Right now, the University of Innopolis started the selection for higher education programs - this is not only a master's program, but also a bachelor's program. All the details here . Hope to see you soon!
I studied at the Kazan Federal University at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Information Technologies, VMK. Before I entered Innopolis University, I managed to get industrial experience at DLS , where I worked for 2 years.
I have to say that it was very difficult to act. TOEFL I passed only the second time. Therefore, my advice to all who undertake this, do not repeat my mistakes. I was preparing for the exam for 3 months, which was clearly not enough. Lay on the preparation of more time, much more. In the speech part of the test I was especially helped by the practice of traveling abroad (Work and Travel) and communicating there with different people exclusively in English. Nevertheless, all the difficult exams, all the obstacles that I had overcome on the way to my goal, were worth it. Now I feel pleasure and great interest from studies and from teachers.
')
It is worth noting that the System and Network Engineering program has a very high intensity: the teacher gives the material and immediately after the lectures practical classes begin. Moreover, the tasks are directly related to the lecture material and all this goes in parallel. In the practical part, you can spend as much time as you need. Before the exam, professors check the practical task and, if the student, in their opinion, coped with the task and did it well, admits it to the exam. If a student has completed the task incorrectly, he receives feedback with a list of tasks to be corrected. But it must be borne in mind that even after the correction, the task may again be performed incorrectly. In this case, the teacher, first of all, looks at the thinking of the student. There are cases that the student did the assignment wrong, but the teacher, considering the time spent on the assignment, and taking into account the ways and ways of thinking, still allows for the exam.
One of the subjects that we study is called “Network and System Security” . The teacher constantly invites different companies to the university so that they give lectures for students and give some practical task. One of these tasks that business representatives brought with them was to try to break into a seemingly normal bank card. We needed to understand the technology (mechanism) of card hacking and how it is done in real companies. Because manufacturers of world-famous bank cards very often hold events in which different companies are trying to break into their new system of protecting electronic payment documents.
Well, now it's time to talk about the fundamental differences between education in Europe and Russian education. The main thing is a large amount of time allotted to the practice, and motivating the presentation of information. All teachers are real enthusiasts of their field: they find a way to each student and give a strong zeal to study the subject.
At the University of Amsterdam, I have already studied 4 subjects: the necessary skills, classic Internet applications, the security of networks and systems, and distributed systems. The most favorite was the subject of "classic Internet applications." Teaches him the program director of the System and Network Engineering Karst Coymans. Why do I highlight it? He talks about the things that happen in everyday life that will be useful to you in the future. In addition, he gives the necessary material, he is fascinating to talk about each individual technology, its advantages and disadvantages, the specific problems faced by large corporations.
We only study in English, and in everyday life everyone speaks Dutch, which at first caused me discomfort. But after immersion in the educational process, it faded into the background.
I live in a student campus (photo) in a room that looks more like an apartment, with all the necessary living conditions. The campus itself is located 5 minutes walk from the University, which helps me significantly save on transport. A small number of people live in this area of Amsterdam, which I really like. I eat in the university canteen: lunch, dinner. I cook breakfast myself. There are 40 people in our group and only 5 students came from abroad: I am from Russia, an American, a British, a Pole and a girl from Italy.
Part of my expenses were paid for with the Global Education grant, so anyone who wants to cut a bone should pay close attention to it.
Thesis
Just want to say that at the University of Amsterdam, this is not called a thesis, but a research project. We have two such projects in total, the topics for which you decide for yourself or choose from the list of available ones provided by the university.
Already, in January, I will have the first research project on how large corporations and application developers use various methods and FrameWork to check the phone for root / jailbreak. One of the clearest examples of such projects at the university is the work of one of the students, who last year hacked a car of a famous brand using the automaker's mobile application, which is freely available in the app store and play market. He spent the whole month on this project. The main difficulties of his work lay in the fact that, in addition to hacking the car system, there are also ethical frameworks of projects: that is, the student must put forward a proposal for a specific project to the ethics committee of the university. He must give certain guarantees that only his private car will be subjected to hacking and strangers will not be involved. Also, this university body must provide a full list of actions that you are going to take in the project.
My own work, on which I had been working for the last few months, was based on working with the server, which is located at the University of Amsterdam. It has a special fee, with which you can control it remotely: turn it on, turn it off, etc. The task of my project was to crack the board and determine how resistant it is to hacker attacks and external influences. In this case, we used a number of techniques: we opened the server, studied how the board worked, how it works, used the brute force method, prepared the environment in advance, disconnecting our servers from the Internet to leave access to them only for us. After that, we found some vulnerabilities, having established that it is possible during authorization to send a command that would allow access to this board for attackers.
Also, an interesting project is being developed by my classmates, who were mainly focused on hacking a well-known messenger through a web application and searching for a system vulnerability . As it turned out, this version of the famous program, adapted for browsers, does not have any special security holes, but the guys did manage to detect certain problems. They connected all the phones and one computer at hand to one WI-FI point to monitor traffic and exchanged pictures using phones, examining data packets. The guys found that in each package there is a link to the file being transferred. That is, they could just copy this link, redirect to the computer and completely free to open the image on the screen or any other device. Therefore, by connecting to any public WI-FI access point, you can potentially track all links to files that are transferred using an instant messenger in this area, which is quite a serious problem. For all of us, this was a strange surprise.
Last but not least
From interesting things about myself in everyday life, I found that many words in Dutch and Russian have the same meaning. Suppose a crane: in both Russian and the language of the country of tulips, the word has two meanings at once - water and construction. Tea in Dutch will be the same as ours - tea.
Unfortunately or fortunately, there is simply no time left for extracurricular activity. I spend about 40-50 hours to study a week, but, in principle, everyone decides for himself how much time to devote to his studies. Someone gets the problem to solve faster, and someone in the study help skills acquired earlier. But then we just travel all over Europe. For example, we went to Paris with a group.
Now I am starting work on my own project at Deloitte , headquartered in Amsterdam. The organization itself is engaged in activities in various fields, one of which is information security. In the next part, I will try to tell in detail about this work and what else impressed and amazed me at the University of Amsterdam, and come back with a new batch of interesting nuances about getting education abroad.
For everyone who wants to learn modern information technologies, I want to say: go ahead and succeed! Right now, the University of Innopolis started the selection for higher education programs - this is not only a master's program, but also a bachelor's program. All the details here . Hope to see you soon!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/275161/
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