Practice the task of independent, rigorous internet-based research, including techniques known as open source intelligence collection and threat research through the collection of materials related to hacker organizations
Understand, analyze and describe the capabilities and activities of hackers
Demonstrate a professional approach to research and analysis through the development and production of a whitepaper on hacker organizations using diffuse sources

Once a group has been assembled students will register the hacker organization they have selected with the instructor. Once that organization has been selected by a student group it cannot by another group of students (first come-first serve), as such students are encouraged to have a second and third choice.

Students who did not attend class or did not have a group will be expected to find one during class hours and will not be assigned a group by the instructor.

Students are encouraged to break their groups into roles which cover not only parts of the assignment but general responsibilities. A good group should have a:

Publisher – this is the person responsible for assembling different parts of the assignment, making sure the formatting, fonts and design of the whitepaper is seamless. The publisher sets deadlines for all of the deliverables needed from group members, since they are the individual responsible for sending the final assignment to the instructor.

IT Architect – the person who sets up communications (e-mail, chat, etc), file sharing and any other collaborative tools. It is the architect’s job to make sure the team has the information and tools to collaborate on the assignment. A good architect will have these tools ready in a timely and accessible way.

Proofreader – while every team member should be responsible for copy editing the final assignment, it is the proofreader’s job to review the entire document and ensure it is free of spelling and grammar errors, but also that it is consistently APA formatted.

If the group has a fourth member, that person should also act a proofreader.

Description
A whitepaper is a professional document designed to inform a reader about a specific topic or subject. In many workplaces there is often a demand for professional reports which describe the operations of hacker organizations since widespread knowledge of these groups is usually limited. Whitepapers are designed to be informative and persuasive: they establish the facts about a subject, but also emphasize a specific way of understanding the subject.

In the media these documents are sometimes used as primers for further research or reporting on an organization, in information security these reports are useful for identifying potential hazards and risks to clients or the host organization, for many governments this kind of documentation can be used to help shape or establish policy positions and laws.

For example: a dossier on elections security hacktivist organization might be used by a documentary producer to identify people with subject matter expertise for on-air interviews to talk about the importance of voting security to the public, while an information security organization might draw on that same research to identify opportunities to improve its security posture or technologies by mitigating vulnerabilities, while a government might use that brief to identify new policies or laws that set rules or regulations on technology used in elections.

A key objective of this assignment will be to demonstrate an understanding of the strategies, techniques and capabilities that hacker organizations utilize to perform technical, social or political interventions and activities. In some cases this may be very technical, like the use of malicious software by intelligence agencies to perform espionage, in other cases this might be less technical and have more to do with trying to organize high-tech workers into a labour union or providing legal support for hackers facing prosecution from wealthy corporations or the government.

This project will require a high degree of independent research, where students will synthesize secondary materials such as (other) whitepapers, newspaper articles, books and journal articles along with primary research into these organizations (social media, websites, etc). Students are recommended to take a ‘snowball’ approach: as you start to perform research new incidents, events, members, reporting, software will likely present themselves. Follow each of those threads through to their conclusion to collect more data. The assignment is also about selecting relevant material: for some organizations you may be overwhelmed with information, you will have to editorialize and select the most relevant information. It may be the case that you choose to focus on a set of specific activities that organization has performed. For other organizations, information might be quite limited and you will have to extrapolate information and identify useful data tangentially.

All references in the paper should be made using APA style citations and the assignment should include an APA style bibliography at the end, which does not count towards the page requirement for the assignment.

Peer Evaluation
Students will be given time in class to organize infrastructure, roles, etc. Students will e-mail the instructor a single report and individually upload a peer evaluation of their group members on Quercus.

20% of the grade for this assignment will be the result of peer evaluation – this means that individuals who do not contribute to group efforts will be significantly penalized. Each student will submit a 1-page evaluation of their peers. For each group member, the student should provide 2-3 sentences describing their peer’s contribution to the assignment, any comments on their success and identify opportunities for improvement. If a student does not submit a peer evaluation their assignment will automatically be subject to a -20% penalty and late marks will apply to that student’s assignment for each day the evaluation is missing.

Students are expected to access only publicly available sources of information about the organization they have selected. Under no circumstances are students encouraged contact these organizations, their members or access any of software or private systems operated by these organizations. Students who choose to disregard this advice do so at their own risk and with the express understanding that the course instructor does not endorse/condone/support this behavior.

Student groups are discouraged from selecting organizations which they would feel morally compromised/unsafe/unable to evaluate objectively. For example: an students who routinely travel to a country which operates the military unit or intelligence organization they are analyzing may feel unsafe performing research into that organization due to scrutiny they may face at border crossings or while visiting/living in that country.

When describing the capabilities of a hacker organization student groups are encouraged to approach them at their preferred comfort level. For example: students who are not versed in malware analysis should describe the operation of malicious software in layperson’s terms and are not expected to provide technical analysis of security vulnerabilities, the killchain or the exploit it uses. Students with a background in software analysis, coding or security might opt to a more technical analysis. In either case both groups will be graded on how effectively they communicate this information, not on the level of technical detail they are prepared to go into.