In October 2025, iTrust welcomed students from Tanglin Trust School as part of the Institute at Tanglin’s outreach programme designed for Year 12 and Year 13 students. This marked our first collaboration with an international school where our programme introduced students to a broad range of cybersecurity fields, including network security, OT security, and penetration testing.

To help students understand the Cyber Kill Chain, each participant worked with two Virtual Machines (VMs): one acting as the adversary and the other as the victim. Using these VMs, they carried out realistic attack scenarios on their own host machines and learnt to use tools such as Metasploit to compromise the victim system.

The programme covered both IT and OT security. Students were introduced to key cybersecurity frameworks, including MITRE ATT&CK and the Cyber Kill Chain, which outlines the seven stages of an attack: Reconnaissance, Weaponisation, Delivery, Exploitation, Installation, Command and Control (C2), and Actions on Objectives.

The training began with network security fundamentals, where students learnt how devices connect, how to interpret network topology, and how to determine whether devices are in the same subnet. With this foundation, they progressed to hands-on exercises using penetration-testing tools provided by iTrust to simulate adversaries infiltrating an Engineering Workstation (EWS) within a water treatment plant network.

After obtaining access, students performed reconnaissance to understand their position in the network and confirm whether they had reached the OT environment. They then moved into the OT security component, where they learnt how the water treatment process operates. This enabled them to execute controlled OT attack scenarios safely and effectively.

We are pleased to work with Tanglin Trust School in introducing OT focused skills in aspiring cybersecurity professionals and welcome the students to join iTrust as undergraduate interns in years to come.

This article by Andy Tay, Education Lead, iTrust, Singapore University of Technology and Design, for iTrust’s Newsletter.