How I helped University of Iloilo Students learn RPA and Social Engineering
I was honored to be given the opportunity to talk to University of Iloilo students by Mr. Seth Nono, Dean of College of Computer Studies on 11th October 2019. I covered two topics entitled: Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Social Engineering. There were 108 attendees composed of mostly college students taking up Bachelor of Information Technology and there were few senior high school students.
The first session that I discussed was Robotic Process Automation, or RPA as it’s often called. RPA became mainstream around 2015 where it brought automation to enterprise repetitive tasks through smart “software robots”. In 2019, the enterprises spent more than $2.3 billion and may grow exponentially by 35–40% to $11 billion in next five years based on the research of Zinnov. In the Philippines, the trend is just starting and it’s a good opportunity that the students are exposed to this emerging technology; and it may help them land a job in the future. Reed Elsevier Philippines started implementing RPA company-wide and, in our team, we are using it in our projects to improve our processing time on accessibility testing.
Currently, this topic is not part of university curriculum. From my perspective, this concept is relatively difficult for the students to understand, as it is quite technical and complicated. After the session, many of them approached me and mentioned that they want to get a copy of my presentation, and would like to research the topic further and deepen their knowledge.
My second session was Social Engineering. This is also part of my post-graduate entry projects to conduct a seminar related to computer ethics. Social Engineering is the act of deceiving someone to get login credentials and personal or financial information. On the report of We Are Social, it shows that Filipinos spend an average of 10 hours and 2 minutes a day on the internet or social media sites, which makes us at the top of the list in the world. Social media has made it easier for attackers to collect necessary data, where regular users would post publicly like what they usually eat, where they often go, what activities they do and their educational background. The criminals use different attacks by leveraging the information they collected to create a story, manipulate them, or send malicious links. They often attack students because students use social media the most and they are an easy target. To wrap up my presentation, I advised my audience what they need to know to avoid becoming a victim of these attacks.
The feedback from the students was great because this is the topic that they can relate to. They use social media daily, most of them have personal experience of being hacked and too many of them were not aware of phishing. They enjoyed the activity I created where they had to spot phishing emails and they would get a free sticker from me.
Overall, I had fun, enjoyed my conversations with the students and was happy to share my own knowledge with them. Many students were keen to learn about our company, and vice versa, our Human Resource team was happy to collaborate with the University to attract talent. Hopefully many students will join our company soon. Thank you, Dean Seth, for the opportunity and the University of Iloilo Programming Circle for organizing my talk.
