Thought — What’s One Of The Most Annoying Things That’s Happened to Me?
Getting hacked…
My robotics team has always had a problem of keeping track of member contributions. Our team has requirements for traveling, and lettering. My junior year, I built an attendance tracker that used a barcode scanner to scan a student’s ID and keep track of attendance. Attendance was a big factor of member contributions. However, after months of using it, the entire database was hacked, and we lost hundreds (maybe thousands) of entries. Unfortunately, we did not even have a backup of the data either, it was all gone. I had to announce to the whole team that a system I built got hacked. Luckily, we did have the server logs. We were able to figure out how our system was penetrated, and I took note of that. This year, we needed a new system. So my friend and I created a completely new and innovative solution. Instead of keeping track of just attendance, it tracks all of the activities that students do throughout the season. We secured the system as much as possible (also referencing last year’s attack) and we are also backing up the data. We have included 2–3 times the safeguards to hopefully prevent a repeat of last year (as well as 2–3 times the code).