This semester, for my Science Coop Work Experience IDS course, I was given a project with free reign over the topic, to relate to the career path I’m pursuing. I chose a cybersecurity-related project, to create a C++ program to simulate a malware that transmits data in binary code through a connected monitor’s brightness setting.

The foundations for the program, which include all the functions preceding the brightness changes, were implemented successfully with minor debugging. I attribute this to my previous experience in C++, so I was able to manipulate the code more easily due to my understanding of the syntax. These functions worked exactly as intended.

However, I was unable to implement the brightness-related functions on time. This is because any methods I could use to implement these functions were either deprecated from the programming language or were very advanced, as in WMI or Win32 programming. The Win32 implementation I chose and understood the best could not work with my existing code, which I did not have time to rewrite. In its place, I chose to simulate this function for presentation purposes using a macro program to make brightness changes the same way one normally would manually.

In terms of my approach to this project, I would like to research the WMI method in further detail, or investigate whether other programming languages would have been able to achieve my goal more easily.

Regarding supporting the school as part of Tech Team, I volunteered for in-person support on a few occasions during the semester, but admittedly, overall I haven’t done much, but I plan to volunteer more this coming semester. In addition, I would suggest some way of encouraging students to come to the Tech Team for help whenever they have tech problems instead of leaving themselves stumped on it. I say this because the tech support Teams group gets very little traffic, but this could easily be because the school is tech-literate enough to solve problems on its own and not being stumped. This encouragement could come in the form of reminders posted around the school that the Tech Team is here to support it. Announcements to social media may also help.