Nothing to snort at!

Ashley Chonka has worked out a rip-snorter of a way for an impoverished PhD student to pay for an expensive training course.

He won a scholarship from the company running the course.

“I had looked at this course that was offered by the company in America called Sourcefire,” Ashley said.

“When I spoke to the salesman, he told me the cost of the course was around $US4000.

“I told him I was just a poor PhD student and then he told me that Sourcefire had a number of scholarships available to university students using Sourcefire’s Snort programs in their studies.

“I submitted the work I was already doing for my PhD which involved Snort and I won the $US5000 scholarship which you’d have to say - and everyone has since hearing my story - was nothing to snort at.”

Ashley used Snort on the Australian Honeypot/Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) project he had started at the beginning of the year under the supervision of Professor Wanlei Zhou, head of Deakin’s School of Information Technology.

He built a “honeypot”, the aim of which is to attract attackers to a phoney website in order to monitor their activities.

The collected information then forms part of new defence programs for legitimate websites.

It also forms a large part of Ashley's PhD thesis entitled: Protecting Web Services from DDoS Attacks.

“I am just about finished,” he said. “I hope to have it all finalised in June.

“I am very grateful to Wanlei for the initial support he gave me.

“He funded the research through an ARC Linkage grant with BCC Computers in Geelong that allowed me to win the Snort scholarship."

Ashley is not sure of where to from here now that he has just about finished his studies at Deakin.

“I have looked at jobs in Government departments and so on, but I guess my main focus at the moment is finishing off the PhD,” he says.

Wherever life takes him though, he’s already got one rip-snorter of a story to tell his grandchildren!

For more information on Ashley Chonka’s scholarship:
http://www.sourcefire.com/products/snort/scholarship

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