About

We established ourselves as a small group of skilled cybersecurity enthusiasts in 2022 and became a club in the Centre for Innovation in 2023.

We are a dedicated group of students who share a strong passion for computer and information security. Our primary goal is to introduce students to the fascinating field of cybersecurity and address complex challenges through CTFs, research projects and collaborations with the industry.

What you can anticipate from our team:

What is Hacking?

We as a team personally feel that The Art of Exploitation tackles this question the best. Hence, we’ll be borrowing the author’s words for this.

Borrowing from The Art Of Exploitation

The idea of hacking may conjure stylized images of electronic vandalism, espionage, dyed hair, and body piercings. Most people associate hacking with breaking the law and assume that everyone who engages in hacking activities is a criminal. Granted, there are people out there who use hacking techniques to break the law, but hacking isn’t really about that. In fact, hacking is more about following the law than breaking it. The essence of hacking is finding unintended or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem — whatever it may be.

The following math problem illustrates the essence of hacking: Use each of the numbers 1, 3, 4, and 6 exactly once with any of the four basic math operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) to total 24. Each number must be used once and only once, and you may define the order of operations; for example, 3 * (4 + 6) + 1 = 31 is valid, however incorrect, since it doesn’t total 24.The rules for this problem are well defined and simple, yet the answer eludes many. Like the solution to this problem, hacked solutions follow the rules of the system, but they use those rules in counterintuitive ways. This gives hackers their edge, allowing them to solve problems in ways unimaginable for those confined to conventional thinking and methodologies.

Since the infancy of computers, hackers have been creatively solving problems. In the late 1950s, the MIT model railroad club was given a donation of parts, mostly old telephone equipment. The club’s members used this equipment to rig up a complex system that allowed multiple operators to control different parts of the track by dialing in to the appropriate sections. They called this new and inventive use of telephone equipment hacking; many people consider this group to be the original hackers.

The group moved on to programming on punch cards and ticker tape for early computers like the IBM 704 and the TX-0. While others were content with writing programs that just solved problems, the early hackers were obsessed with writing programs that solved problems well. A new program that could achieve the same result as an existing one but used fewer punch cards was considered better, even though it did the same thing. The key difference was how the program achieved its results — elegance. Being able to reduce the number of punch cards needed for a program showed an artistic mastery over the computer. A nicely crafted table can hold a vase just as well as a milk crate can, but one sure looks a lot better than the other. Early hackers proved that technical problems can have artistic solutions, and they thereby transformed programming from a mere engineering task into an art form.

Like many other forms of art, hacking was often misunderstood. The few who got it formed an informal subculture that remained intensely focused on learning and mastering their art. They believed that information should be free and anything that stood in the way of that freedom should be circumvented. Such obstructions included authority figures, the bureaucracy of college classes, and discrimination. In a sea of graduation-driven students, this unofficial group of hackers defied conventional goals and instead pursued knowledge itself. This drive to continually learn and explore transcended even the conventional boundaries drawn by discrimination, evident in the MIT model railroad club’s acceptance of 12-year-old Peter Deutsch when he demonstrated his knowledge of the TX-0 and his desire to learn. Age, race, gender, appearance, academic degrees, and social status were not primary criteria for judging another’s worth — not because of a desire for equality, but because of a desire to advance the emerging art of hacking.

The original hackers found splendor and elegance in the conventionally dry sciences of math and electronics. They saw programming as a form of artistic expression and the computer as an instrument of that art. Their desire to dissect and understand wasn’t intended to demystify artistic endeavors; it was simply a way to achieve a greater appreciation of them. These knowledge driven values would eventually be called the Hacker Ethic: the appreciation of logic as an art form and the promotion of the free flow of information, surmounting conventional boundaries and restrictions for the simple goal of better understanding the world.

This is not a new cultural trend; the Pythagoreans in ancient Greece had a similar ethic and subculture, despite not owning computers. They saw beauty in mathematics and discovered many core concepts in geometry. That thirst for knowledge and its beneficial byproducts would continue on through history, from the Pythagoreans to Ada Lovelace to Alan Turing to the hackers of the MIT model railroad club. Modern hackers like Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak have continued the hacking legacy, bringing us modern operating systems, programming languages, personal computers, and many other technologies that we use every day.

Let’s get in touch

Have a project idea or collaboration in mind? Get in touch and let’s make it happen!