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This is an IT Support Group
​Weekly IT Roundup 🤠

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Happy Friday, IT Professionals!

It’s been a busy past week.

We launched our 2024 IT Salary Survey and received over 1100 responses!

That’s our largest response yet.

If you’re interested in a map of the data, I also launched a web app last night called IT Salary Map you can play with.

Thank you all for participating and I hope the data is useful.

Also, don’t miss this week’s community feature about creating Rogue APs with Simon Vance.

See ya next week

-Stetson

Tech News TL;DR

This week’s IT and tech news in 5-minutes-ish or less

Cyber-Security

Artificial Intelligence

Misc

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Class schedules are usually evenings (US/UK) and are fixed so you know exactly when you have to be there. All you need is a quiet work space to teach, a commitment to the class schedule, and a passion to help others in IT.

Community Highlight 🚀

Short interviews and highlights with members of This is an IT Support Group.

Simon’s battery operated rogue AP

Simon, can you tell us a little about yourself and your capstone project?

Hello! I'm Simon, I'm a hobbyist/maker of all sorts and cybersecurity enthusiast. I love to work with microcontrollers and I love to make my own tools. I run a business on the side 3d printing obscure parts for bakery/kitchen equipment, as well as my D&D dice business. I have built 3d printers from scratch and know the machines inside and out, and I love working with them.

My High School Senior capstone project here is something I’m especially proud of, where I expanded upon the idea of warshipping. Warshipping is a technique in which mailed packages are sent as a part of an attack vector. My project here is built to broadcast a captive portal page to phish people into giving up login information, for the sake of relevance in this case school IDs and passwords.

What class was the project for?

This was for my Cybersecurity and Networking class at the career center I go to. Here I work through the IT and Cybersec fields to get certifications and job experience. I have my A+ and am soon testing for Net+ and Sec+ certs. 

How did you get the idea for the project? 

I didn’t come up with the idea of warshipping, I first heard of it through a null byte interview, but I do think it has a lot of potential. I love working with hardware and wanted to do a hardware based project, and I found this as something that could be explored much more while being a fun and educational project.

What hardware does your rogue AP use? 

When I made this my objectives were for it to be cheap, simple, and quickly replicable. I built it off of the D1 Mini Pro, an ESP8266 board. It’s powered by an off the shelf 27Ah battery. All together it can be built for under $20 and assembled in minutes (can be as little as $7 depending on the battery). With the battery I used it can broadcast for up to 10 days and can idle indefinitely while being shipped.

You mentioned Geofencing in your post, what is that and how does it work?

Geofencing is a method I use to trigger the device once it becomes in range of the target, both to save on battery and to stay within postal regulations. To keep costs low and simple, I went with a trigger network setup. Once the device detects the network of the target site it begins to broadcast its own. It can trigger through multiple SSIDs as a failsafe and for development.

What language did you use to program your project? 

This is programmed in C++ and HTML through the arduino ecosystem. I built it off existing code by 125K on github but I tweaked it to have a more realistic login page, optimize for battery, and add a few features like geofencing. A cool feature of the program that I spent a lot of time on is it uses a section of the flash memory as an EEPROM for persistent memory in case the battery dies or the board resets.

What are you doing after High School? Will you go into IT or tech as a career?

I am actively looking for open opportunities including jobs and attending college for computer science. I have 3 years of IT experience and 2 years of cybersecurity/networking education, and would love to continue that after graduation. I learn by doing and hands-on experience is something I highly value, and I am more than open to new opportunities.

Anything else you’d like people to know about yourself or projects you’re working on?

Feel free to reach out to me! I love hearing about people’s personal experiences in the IT world and would love to tell you more about my projects. Ask me about my 3lb combat robot! I am on facebook and instagram, and my email is [email protected]

Thanks to Simon for taking the time to chat with us!

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