Writing and Editing of a First Paper (in uni at least)

 This is part 2 of a two part collaborative blog with my friend and course mate. Check out part 1 here.

 

As part of a course at uni we have had the pleasure of diving into the fires of uni paper writing and I am happy to announce a great success, for my pretty little words (3394 of them in fact) set in the right order I managed to get full points for the assignment—a result I am obviously happy with. (I did lose two points for the slides I used in my presentation for too much text 😭)

Sharing this news (definitely not to brag) with my friend we got to talking about our papers and long-story-short I got to provide some editing help (let's be honest it was 90% just telling him to follow formatting guidelines) and I enjoyed it, as I am quite good at the nuances of language when I care to try. But another reason I read his paper was for peer review, another method of gaining points for our course. I won't be going into details here but he wrote an interesting paper on RATs (remote access tools), which I will be reviewing; my favourite part was a case study he included of himself being a victim of a malicious RAT malware.

 

I myself wrote a paper on social engineering and how it highlights how humans will, for now at least, remain an incredibly unpredictable part of any process (though I focused on the cybersecurity aspect of it). And if by any chance someone has read my 12.09 post from this year where I teased a book review of Hadnagy's "Social Engineering: The Science of Human Hacking"—I haven't forgotten, in fact I originally picked it up for this paper. To sum up what I learned—social engineering is the use and abuse of human communication. Now what does that mean, because as a stand-alone sentence it doesn't really make sense. What I mean is that social engineering uses various techniques to take advantage of communicate psychology, trust, and peoples tendency to help others. Quite an insidious field really, one that I love for it's intricacies and hate for how it's used to take advantage of people. While writing the paper I thought quite a lot about the ethical aspects of social engineering and came to this conclusion: "What a shame, that people do not have the luxury of being naïve." 

 

P.S. Is it a conflict of interest to review a paper you helped edit? 😓

 

- Stern Kittel (alias Sasha if you came from Dima's blog)