Career and Technical Education (CTE) CyberNet seeks to increase the number of CTE teachers who can effectively prepare students for cybersecurity education and careers. CTE CyberNet is driven by a local academy approach to help teachers deliver more rigorous CTE cybersecurity programs of study aligned to industry standards and industry-valued certifications. The academies give educators strategies and tools to impart the knowledge, skills, and abilities outlined in the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Cybersecurity Workforce Framework.

The cybersecurity workforce suffers from an ongoing talent shortage and there is a lack of information correlating cybersecurity education programs to alumni employment outcomes. This exploratory, cross-sectional study will evaluate the post-graduation employment outcomes of alumni that attended two-year colleges designated by the National Security Agency as Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.

The HBCU Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity (AI-CyS) Research Partnership consists of the following universities: Hampton, Florida A&M, Winston Salem State, University of District of Columbia, Mississippi Valley State, Norfolk State, and Howard universities working together to increase each of our individual institute’s research capacity and enhance our research collaboration.

The CAE-CD Regional Outreach Competition Committee was established by the CAE- Community of Practice (CoP) – Cyber Defense (CD): 1) to encourage and promote cybersecurity awareness and online safety practices by taking advantage of the cybersecurity outreach CAEs do throughout the year; 2) to maximize the impacts of the CAEs on the community; and 3) to strengthen the collaborative relationships between CAE Regional Hubs and their member institutions.

Incident response training is designed to test an organization's ability to respond to a cybersecurity attack. It involves developing a tabletop attack scenario and then running through the incident response plan to determine whether the plan is effective in detecting, containing, and remedying the attack. During the exercise, participants are required to make decisions and take actions as they would in a real cybersecurity attack. The exercise brings together various teams within the organization, including IT, security, legal, and public relations.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a class of network attacks when attackers utilize malware or stealthy tools to hide their actions in a network and systems over a prolonged period so that they can eventually achieve strategic goals such as causing substantial damage to the victim organization by data exfiltration. Although APT has long been a research subject, it continues to be a serious threat for many organizations.

As more and more information technology workloads move to the cloud, it is imperative that students entering the workforce have the skills needed to implement cybersecurity practices. The concepts of identity and access management, least privilege access, compliance enforcement, and incident response are theoretical concepts that may take years to put into practice once students reach the workforce.

This research presentation explores the value of cybersecurity competitions in cyber defense education and its impact on the cybersecurity industry and workforce development. Competitions are considered active and challenge based learning that can be used as effective pedagogies to improve student interest, motivation, and problem solving in education. For cyber defense education quality assurance, student participation in cyber competitions is one of the criteria required for the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense designation by the National Security Agency.

To aid organizations in finding relevant skills, organizations must first identify what skills they are really looking for. These needs must be conveyed in a format that job seekers can easily identify. A model exists to allow organizations to better identify what and why skills are needed from potential employees. Job seekers need to better categorize their skills based upon recognized components of cybersecurity not the general blanket term "cybersecurity".

RING (Regions Investing in the Next Generation) is a free online high school cybersecurity course that offers interesting and engaging content specifically for rural students, homeschool students, and students attending schools without an existing cybersecurity program. RING is structured for high school students, grades 9-12. The curriculum has been developed through the National Security Agency’s RING program grant to The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).