About robots, cops and robbers - Swiss National Future Day 2018

Here at InfoGuard, once again National Future Day was a huge success this year. Kids from all over Switzerland had the oportunity to accompany one of their parents to work and for the first time get an impression of working life. On this special day, nine children from the 5th and 6th grade received an insight into the fascinating world of cyber security. Together with our experts, they experienced the daily routine at InfoGuard. Luca, Lorena, Liam, Pascal, Gianmarco, Lucas, Claudio, Noah and Christos tell us all about their experiences in this blog article.

The day started in the kitchen. Here we were given a warm welcome. When everyone had arrived, they took us on a tour of InfoGuard. We got to know InfoGuard's various departments and now we know - there are actually a lot of different jobs that you don't see at first sight. Then we went into a conference room. Every room is named after a known computer virus. Once we arrived in the room, we got to know each other. Thomas Meier is the boss of InfoGuard and he explained us how everything works. Thomas Meier is a huge fan of Zug's ice hockey club EVZ. So it' no surprise that Tobias Stephan, the goalie of the EVZ, has adverts for InfoGuard on his stick glove and his helmet. Then we were allowed to ask a few questions about day-to-day life, for example, how many times a day they are attacked by hackers. He replied, "around 100-200 times a day".

Then we were divided into two teams: the Red and the Blue team. The Red team played cops and robbers in the morning and it was the Blue team's turn in the afternoon.

Robots, cops and robbers

Today we have learnt how to programme a robot and an alarm system. The alarm system works like this: the first thing we did was
to install a light barrier with a lamp and a reflector. The reflector will send the light back to the source as long as there is nothing in its way. Then we connected this barrier by a cable to our alarm system. Then we programmed the alarm system computer via Wi-Fi so that if the visual contact between the reflector and the light signal transmitter is broken, a blue light starts flashing once a second. Then one of the trainees showed us how to programme an MBot and how the robot processed and handled this code. Afterwards, we were allowed to make a track for the robot with black tape, which the robot had to follow.

Later we got an insight into the Cyber Defence Center (CDC) and also got exciting information. We learned the difference between white hats and black hats (good and bad hackers) and that there are about 10,000 hacker attacks a day. Then we found out that anyone can be a victim of a hacker attack at any time!

The dangers of the internet

After a fun lunch at McDonald's, we talked about the dangers of the Internet and how to protect yourself against them. Now we know that you shouldn't entrust any personal data to the Internet, because once it's online, you can't delete it and it could be misused by hackers.

Afterwards, we talked about various old-fashioned encryption methods, for example, the Caesar code, and we wrote our own secret messages using a circular disk on which the entire alphabet was written. You have to encrypt going from the inside to the outside and decode from the outside to the inside. For example, what does the following mean, decoded with the code in the picture?

E R K Z F E R C   W L K L I V   U R P

Marketing - Logos everywhere

We discovered what marketing strategy InfoGuard uses. They also gave us gummy bears, ballpoint pens, notebooks and USB sticks with the InfoGuard logo on them. They also have sunglasses, key rings and lots of different brochures for customers. Then we were split up into teams and wrote this blog article.

It was cool, exciting and super fun. Thank you for this action-packed day!

So, could you decipher the words? The right answer is "National Future Day".