CoolCyber

Inspiration

Our team recognizes how hard it is to get started in the field of cybersecurity. We constantly see other students struggling to grasp the concepts (and we were all in that position ourselves). We wanted to create something that could guide newcomers along the right direction.

What it does

The homepage of the site contains a video explaining the importance of cybersecurity. This page also has quick links for learning some basic topics. We have a more comprehensive resource page. This page has links for different topics (general, programming, networking, blogs & news, Linux, and CTF exercises). We have a quiz that tests users for basic knowledge about networking fundamentals, security concepts, and hacking. There are different results pages that direct users to specific resources based on their performance.

How we built it

Most of the work was done with HTML and CSS (both Bootstrap and some custom CSS). We also got help from this http://founderweb.com/quiz_generator/index.shtml for our quiz page. The domain name (coolcyber.tech) was obtained from Domain.com. We hosted the site on a Digital Ocean droplet running Apache.

Challenges we ran into

Overcoming the time constraint was a big challenge. We originally planned to post our own articles outlining basic cyber topics. However, we opted to leave that out so we could make the rest of the site better.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We firmly believe that we created a useful product for our target audience. Considering our lack of experience, this project was a big undertaking for a 24 hour period. We all worked hard and pushed into new territory.

What we learned

None of us came into this project with any significant web development experience. First and foremost, we each gained some basic frontend knowledge. Some of us also had little-to-no experience with Git and learned it while working on the site. We also reviewed some basic cyber knowledge while crafting our quiz and putting together resources.

What's next for CoolCyber

This is definitely a rough draft. For future revisions, we would like to clean up the site UI. We would want to add more support for mobile devices and other smaller displays. We could also add more content to teach basics rather than relying as much on outside resources.