Hello everybody.
For my assignment this week, I spent around 40 minutes playing the Nova Cybersecurity Lab game.
The game had three core challenges—Password Cracking, Coding, and Social Engineering—and each taught me something major.
Firstly, the Password Cracking challenge showed how weak passwords leave companies vulnerable to brute-force attacks. It reinforced the class concept of password entropy, where longer, randomized passwords boost security. A lot of the times, with short passwords (4-6words), companies can use software’s to easily crack it. Key takeaway- use a mix of numbers, words, symbols and characters to make it secure.
Then came the Coding challenge, which used drag‑and‑drop syntax to animate a character to move and do things. This showed me the importance of secure coding practices—every line of code matters in building resilient software, just like we learned when discussing secure development lifecycles in class.
Finally, the Social Engineering challenge asked me to identify phishing emails, scam websites, and suspicious calls and differentiate them. It emphasised how cybersecurity isn’t just tech—it’s also about human behavior and awareness—a concept we talked about through risk analysis and user-centric defenses.
Overall, the experience made cybersecurity feel real and urgent. I’ve got the screenshot proof, but this game gave me a new appreciation for how interconnected technical and human components truly are in defending online systems. How everything works together. How cyber security is so crucial today.
Byou 