We are delighted to team up with the Festival of Curiosity to bring you all an Air Quality sensor workshop. The Festival of Curiosity is Dublin’s annual festival of science, arts, design, and technology. We will be introducing the power of the Sensor.Community and how to join this great CitizenScience project. For details of the event follow the link below.
We had a small break with our hacking challenges Redo. The format of the Meetup required a change, to accommodate for less experienced visitors. And as much as I love the SANS Institute Challenges, they tend to be quite a puzzle, especially later one. So for now, we are going to focus on couple other Hacking Challenges that are available online. And hopefully in December, when new 2022 SANS Hack Challenge starts, we will have a group ready to battle it together 🙂
Let’s start from Over the Wire. There are plenty games there, we will start with the Bandit, as most suitable to get used to the platform. Bandit offers 33 levels to play, it teaches Linux commands and tools. In each level your goal is identical, find a password to the next level, but let’s start from the beginning.
Over the Wire artwork
To play Bandit you will need to establish SSH connection to the Over the Wire lab server, all details of connection are given in Level 0.
So, what is SSH?
Secure Shell, sometimes referred to as Secure Socket Shell, is a protocol which allows you to connect securely to a remote computer or a server by using a text-based interface. When a secure SSH connection is established, a shell session will be started, and you will be able to manipulate the server by typing commands within the client on your local computer. System and network administrators use this protocol the most, as well as anyone who needs to manage a computer remotely in a highly secure manner.
How to use SSH on Windows?
Most common ways of using SSH on Windows is by using one of the clients. Most popular clients are: PuTTY, BitwiseSSH and OpenSSH. Windows 10 users have now the option to use build-in OpenSSH client. Just follow the installation details of your choose client.
How to use SSH on Mac?
Mac’s have build-in Terminal feature, that provides SSH client.
How do we do it on Linux?
That shouldn’t be a problem for any regular Linux users, but in case you are just starting with Linux. Go to your terminal and type:
ssh
This should list all ssh details and commands. If that’s not the case, just use the following command to install OpenSSH:
We are super proud to have Dublin Maker return this year and be part of the organisations making it happen. The open call for this year’s virtual event is now open. The event will run on June 19th & 20th. We are hoping to bring a range of projects including something you can all control remotely All the details can be found via the link before.
An early video (above) produced by the project called for ideas/projects that might help the team raise awareness and further the goals of the project. Our member Jeffrey Roe with family links to the town made contact and suggested the Sensor.Community project.
Sensor.Community is a contributor driven global sensor network that creates Open Environmental Data. Its mission is to inspire and enrich people’s lives by offering a platform for the collective curiosity in nature that is genuine, joyful and positive. We have worked in the past with their guides and software created by the project to deliver workshops in the past. This open community citizen science project is only possible with the contributions of the Sensor.Community at large.
The Abbeyleix team jumped on the idea straight away. They were keen to build on the experience that Tog has in running these workshops. One sensor that was already active in the town really showcased the potential for a local network to be created. A plan was drawn up with appearances on Abbeyleix Almanac TV scheduled to raise local awareness in the sensors and a date was set for the 28th of February to coincide with STEPS Engineers Week. Midlands science came on board to fund the event and remove the barrier for local people to get involved.
Network in Ireland before the workshop
With the support of the local Tidy Towns committee, we found 14 participants for the workshop. To cut costs and to support the event being run virtually, glue guns and other tools required for the workshop were found locally and shared creating a real community feel to the whole affair.
Jeffrey on zoom during workshop
Using Zoom and a host of other tools, the workshop ran for just under three hours. Participants flashed the firmware, connected parts, setup WiFi links and put together boxes.
A few weeks have now passed since the workshop and more and more people are mounting their sensors outdoors and getting on the map. All the data can be viewed on the Sensor.Community website.
Sensor in Abbeyleix
To see more photos from the workshop do check out our gallery.
We would like to thank the people of Abbeyleix for being so welcoming to us during this project and especially the Tidy Towns committee, also Midlands Science for the funding to make it possible and finally the continued work of Sensor.Community.
Update
Check out this letter published in the Irish Times about this project.
Arduino Day is a worldwide birthday celebration of Arduino – organized directly by the community, or by the Arduino team. It brings people together “online” to share their experiences and learn more about the open-source platform.
We are hosting a 2 hour live stream with a mix of demos, introduction lessons and contributions from our community.
We will kick things off at 11 am on Saturday the 27th of March on our Youtube channel. The event will be unconference style. We have the topics already (listed below) and would like to open the event to hear from you our community to talk about your projects. Drop us an email to present your project.
On the 23rd of January Meetup we have completed following tasks:
Objective 1 – Uncover Santa’s Gift List – clues in blog post video above
Objective 2a – Kringle Kiosk – clues in blog post video above
Objective 2b – S3 bucket – clues give at a Discord were: update the wordlist and add the searched bucket name, use ‘cat’ command to inspect the bucket. Copy and inspect in CyberChef the file. Start unpacking and remember to pipe the output whenever needed.
Objective 3a – Linux Primer – no clues were needed 🙂
Objective 3b – Point-of-Sale Password Recovery – clues give at a Discord were: download the package, no need to install the shop. Unpack the exe file, and poke around until you find app.asar and use 7zip to open Asar file.
Later today, 5-7pm GMT we will be focusing on following tasks:
all unfinished past tasks
Objective 4a – Unescape Tmux – no help needed
Objective 4b – Santavator operations – no help needed
Objective 5a – Speaker UNPrep – first clue: ‘strings door’ with some filters, more clues @Discord
Objective 5b – 5b: 33 Gkbps – no help needed
Objective 5c – Open the HID lock in the Workshop – no help needed
Objective 6a – Regex Toy Sorting – we will battle it together @Discord
Objective 6b – Splunk Challenge – clue: look for Bro.
