Weekly Activities

Every content week comes with a four-part engagement pack, in addition to the week’s lab and quiz. These activities are practiced in class or assigned as short homework — your instructor will announce each week’s mode on Canvas.

📘 New to these tools? The Student Guides walk you step by step through Google Colab, Hacker101, CTFd, CISA tabletops, and the course readings - how to get in and how to finish each activity. Keep the matching guide open while you work.

🚩 CTFd Challenge

One capture-the-flag challenge per week on the course CTFd server, solvable with Colab and a browser. Difficulty and points ramp up all semester. Flags look like CIS350{...}.

🎲 CISA Mini-Tabletop

A 15-minute incident-response scenario adapted from the CISA Tabletop Exercise Packages, played in small groups with timed injects.

🧑‍💻 Hacker101 Lesson

A short assigned lesson or CTF level from Hacker101 with guided questions connecting it to the week's course concepts.

💬 Packback Discussion

Two open-ended curiosity prompts on the week's theme. Post one question or response before Wednesday's class.

⚖️ Ethics reminder: every hands-on security activity in this course is performed only in the sandboxed environments we provide (course CTFd, Hacker101's intentionally vulnerable apps, tabletop discussion). Applying these techniques to systems you don't own or aren't authorized to test is illegal and a violation of the academic integrity policy.

Graded Weekly Activities (Slides + Worksheets)

Each content week has a graded, 20-point in-class activity with a PowerPoint deck and a student worksheet (PDF). Download links live on each week’s lecture-notes page. Activities are aligned to the official lecture schedule below.

Week	Lecture topic	Activity	Platform
1	Welcome to Cybersecurity	Python & Colab Tutorial + Weak Password Storage & Authentication	Colab + Hacker101
2	Data, the Fuel of AI	Data Exposure & Privacy Violations	Hacker101
3	Supervised Learning	Phishing & Social Engineering	Hacker101
4	Regression & Model Evaluation	Cost-Benefit Trade-Off Under Pressure	CISA Tabletop
5	Unsupervised Learning + Exam 1	Anomaly Detector False Alarms	CISA Tabletop
6	Unsupervised: Finding Hidden Patterns	Intrusion Detection & Anomaly Analysis	Hacker101
7	Semi-Supervised & Reinforcement	When to Request Manual Labels	CISA Tabletop
8	Threats from the Inside: Attackers Use AI	Evade the Filter: Adversarial Email	CTFd
9	Spring Break / Exam 2	(no activity)	—
10	Adversarial Examples & Data Poisoning	Craft Adversarial Examples to Fool a Classifier	CTFd
11	Prompt Injection & LLM Security	Prompt Injection: Break & Defend an LLM Assistant	CTFd
12	AI Ethics, Bias, Fairness & Governance	Fairness Audit Response	CISA Tabletop
13	Privacy in ML + Exam 3	Membership Inference Attack	CTFd
14	Trustworthy & Responsible AI	AI Incident Response: Biased Hiring System	CISA Tabletop
15	Advanced Topics & Course Wrap-Up	Domain Adaptation with Limited Labels	CTFd
16	Final Q&A & Exam Preparation	Responsible AI Governance Board Meeting	CISA Tabletop

Each activity is 20 points, runs 30-40 minutes, and connects to that week's lecture and lab. Three additional activities (feature engineering, bias auditing, federated learning) are kept as optional supplements in the course repository.

Capture the Flag Challenges

Five hands-on CTF challenges run on the course CTFd server. Each is a self-contained Google Colab sandbox (nothing to install, no data leaves your browser). Perform the attack and the notebook prints a flag like CIS350{...} that you submit on CTFd for points.

🚩 Rules of engagement: every challenge is an intentionally vulnerable toy model or mock assistant built only for this course. Attack only the provided sandbox — applying these techniques to any system you do not own or are not authorized to test is illegal and an academic-integrity violation.

Week	Challenge	Category	Pts	Starter
8	Evade the Filter	Evasion	15	Colab starter
10	One Pixel Too Far	Adversarial ML	20	Colab starter
11	Jailbreak the Helpdesk Bot	LLM Security	20	Colab starter
13	Were You in the Data	Privacy	20	Colab starter
15	The Aging Malware Detector	Robustness	20	Colab starter

Upload a starter to Google Colab (File -> Upload notebook), work through the TODO cells, and run the check cell to reveal your flag. Instructor setup and challenge briefs live in the course repository under ctfd/.

Week-by-Week Packs

The four-part engagement packs below are a separate, optional catalog (their week numbering predates the finalized lecture schedule shown above). Complete pack details (CTFd scenarios, tabletop injects, Hacker101 resources, Packback prompts) are documented in Engagement Packs Reference. Packs are posted on Canvas as each week is released.

Quick Reference

Week	Focus	CTFd Difficulty	Tabletop Scenario
1	Security Basics	Easy (10 pts)	Phishing Campaign Response
2	Features & Labels	Easy (10 pts)	Data Quality Incident
3	Classifiers	Medium (15 pts)	False-Positive Filter Tuning
4	Evaluation Metrics	Medium (15 pts)	Cost-Benefit Decision
5	Feature Engineering	Medium (15 pts)	Feature Bottleneck
6	Clustering & Anomaly	Medium (15 pts)	Anomaly Detector False Alarms
7	Semi-Supervised	Medium (15 pts)	When to Label Data
8	Adversarial ML	Hard (20 pts)	Adversarial Attack Response
10	Fairness & Bias	Hard (20 pts)	Fairness Audit Response
12	Privacy & DP	Hard (20 pts)	Privacy Breach Response
13	Federated Learning	Hard (20 pts)	Compromised Aggregator
14	Incident Response	Hard (20 pts)	Biased Hiring Model Incident
15	Transfer Learning	Hard (20 pts)	Deployment to New Domain
16	Responsible AI	Hard (20 pts)	Governance Board Meeting

Week 9: Spring Break / Exam (no activities)
Week 11: Combined with Week 12 Lab 11 (privacy content)

Each pack reinforces that week’s lab work and connects lecture concepts to real-world incident scenarios, hands-on security challenges, and ethics-driven discussions.