Overview

• This page goes over the weekly development of the project. For context, this projects vision did change multiple times throughout the year. For a more in depth look, please consider viewing the legacy wikis.

Week 1-2 (1/27/2024)

• This will mark the first entry within my brand new GitHub repository. My goal of doing this is to improve upon where I failed last semester which was to properly update and flesh out my wikis and entries for myself. Because my two topics from last semester have merged and changed in a variety of ways, I found it best to start from the bottom as a better, redone base will allow for a smoother workflow. I still think it is important to include past documentation so my best option was to link my previous wikis under a legacy section within my table of contents. I plan to either check out or purchase the cybersecurity survival kit once this has been completed or do that along the side.
• I'm not happy with my previous work/research and feel it's best to start from scratch before I get my hands dirty. Once that's been completed its time to begin the work on the actual environment. References will be added under the proper section as things go on. Lastly, a brand new board has been made dividing the work into 4 sprints. The other sprints are only rough predictions as work could take up more/less time so change is always a factor. More official charts is also being worked on.

Week 3

• I faced a massive bump in regard to my environment setup when it came to my capstone project. I was originally working on my school computer I've had all this time here at college to manage my VMS. However, it was recently found that a corrupted file could cause massive trouble later down the road. To fix this however I had to do a fresh image install. Because of this I have been doing everything to recover my progress of getting my base machines back up and ready to go.
• Ontop of that I have proper documentation for installing security onion as an ISO on VM specifically. I plan to install the software this week as that is a main branch of my project.

Week 4

• I met with my professor regarding my current status on my capstone and where to exactly go from here, what needs to change, and what to accomplish during sprint 2? Overall it was a very strong meeting. One of the first tips that he gave me regarding what I already had is to install pfsense into my virtual environment. But one of the big things to discuss was the audience I want to reach with my capstone. He told me to find and focus on a specific audience because that could heavily alter aspects of the project. I think my audience is people who own and can navigate a computer but may not be too familiar with the inner workings of cybersecurity.
• This audience may lower the amount of security onion usage within my entire project, but we will see once I get security onion installed this oncoming week. I also intend to share my notes on cybersecurity for beginners once I am about halfway through.

Week 5-7

• Unfortunately I was unable to work on all too much over weeks 5 and 6 due to personal matters. I was able to still passively read and note down my progress in the cybersecurity for dummies all ready for its heavy focus in sprint 4. As for the environment, I have obtained all the isos I need to create my environment. I also have solid documentation for the security onion which has been successfully set up! My goals for sprint 3 will just be to have the main function going so I can wrap up and polish everything for presentation day.

Week 8

• The environment is fully up and running! All the devices are properly connected and the Security Onion is just about running. Once its setup I need to begin creating a trigger that will go off in security onion. This will consist of a bit of trial and error. My goal is to make sure SO only goes off when a real threat is detected within a network. I may need to downscale my network just a bit as I want to appeal to a less experienced crowd so we shall see once I get this working. That's what matters most currently.

Week 9

Security Onion is up and running. There isn't much different compared to last week as I need to tinker around with the detection system. Nothing malicious or environment-destroying. But enough that I can see and understand the bar that needs to be passed.

Week 10

This week was focused on a massive shift in the project. In order to match my computer novice audience, I have decided to cut down on the environment and drop security onion as it was more focused towards an enterprise. So the current running environment is a actively running Windows 10 vm machine and a ubuntu machine as the attacker machine. The old checks and cards were moved into sprint 2 as most of that was done anyways. Week 3 has been dedicated to research methods and much more. For a better explanation and summary of the shift and my current work, please consult the project post here. From here I have been doing research of security methods for the detection, prevention, and recovery process of an attack, these are currently being filled out under the project board comments so please take a look if your interested! I am now working with my professor to help me with extra eyes on the project to ensure this is in a much more finished state at the time. While im back to research I have a few ideas to compile all my rules and methods in a more kit packed form for anyone to use! I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I'm determined to get this all done as its a subject im really passionate about.

Week 11

(Also in the project board)

The script is pretty much in a completed and functional state! I uploaded GUI_4.0 as the latest and greatest version that I have been creating over the course of this past week! Took a lot of time and testing but all the buttons are layed out in the best way and all features fully work!

The file check feature was included in there aswell. Originally this was going to be on its own script as a launcher but this feels too important to do that so I made it so that and the GUI runs when the file check passes and will be turned into an executable when submitted!.

The actions.ps1 file has all the commands and work done. The testing on my VM windows 10 machine all came back working perfectly! Im going to check off the scripting task as complete as there is little to no coding left besides changing the manual button to link to the actual manual!

There were a lot of unique errors I ran into while implementing each and every feature requiring a different solution for each. Id say each feature took about an hour or two to implement.

From here on out its going to be polishing the code a bit, documentation, presentation/demo, and final paper!

• GUI_4.0
• actions.ps1

Week 12

As for this week, most of my work last week was a majority of the programming side of the project. This week was all about documentation. I have been creating a step by step guide for how to use the kit and the steps to install, what the buttons do, how it helps your computer and other safety measures. This guide will be accessible on both the GitHub and the install zip file! I wanted to dedicate the last weeks of development on this as its just as important to tackle, this is to provide more context as to what's exactly being done with the machine. This wasn't fully finished though and will be wrapped up in the upcoming days. Presentation and report will take up the rest!

Week 13

Here we are! Probably my last update for the week. There isnt much left to be said besides I have been finishing my documentation and test from a fresh machine which has been going great! I did run into some errors at first because of file location but that's all been solved by now! For a more in depth explanation of that please check my sprint 4 report for a in depth look + demo