Maintaining an engaged alumni community can be a challenging task. Many colleges and universities struggle to maintain relationships with alumni because they fail to foster a strong bond with the students before graduation. When students graduate, the student-institution relationship should not end; instead, it should continue progressing as needs and expectations change. Institutions should establish a robust student-institution relationship that grows throughout the student lifecycle and continues beyond graduation.

Engaging discussions between students in asynchronous online courses are an important part of learning yet many find it difficult to develop creative and effective discussion prompts in cybersecurity and other technical courses. Often these discussion prompts end up looking like short answer questions with each student posting very similar responses. It is hard to generate a meaningful conversation from this type of prompt and students often get stuck trying to think of something relevant to say. It doesn’t have to be this way!

The Public Infrastructure Security Cyber Education System (PISCES) is a platform which brings together industry, government, and education to deliver a job ready workforce, engage students with real-world experiences, and provide services to small local government entities which they would not otherwise be able to afford. PISCES places collectors on small governmental networks to collect netflow data. The data is stored on an ELK stack, and is monitored by students who perform anomaly analysis and threat hunting on the real data. Issues discovered are reviewed and reported.

Inspired by a Cloud Security Alliance write-up by the presenter, this session will bring about a fun and interactive Lightning Talk on the topic of introducing music that aligns with the varied work roles and tasks in cybersecurity activities. This Lightning Talk will utilize and play some minor snippets of music (as loud as possible) that correspond to the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Workforce Framework.

Students in multiple cohorts of our 3000 level Fundamentals of Information Systems Security course were given a discussion question where they had to either agree or disagree with the premise that given all the constant threats to our systems, we should dedicate more of our efforts to quickly repairing the damage of an attack rather than dedicate more of our time and energies to preventing such attacks. They were required to give their reasoning and provide sources to back up their analysis of his comment. This talk will describe and explain the concept of cyber resiliency.

This presentation will unveil the technologies and moving pieces that power the NCAE National Competition. The NCAE National Competition team has open sourced this custom platform and is willing to share all of the details, but the infrastructure spans a number of complex technologies and will be daunting even to a veteran systems administrator. The NCAE National Competition team will offer possible pathways to using our infrastructure at your institution outside of the competition season.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the world, and education and cybersecurity are no exception. AI is used to develop new tools and techniques for securing networks, improving risk management, and addressing new threats, and it can be used to enhance classroom instruction and assessments. While AI can be intimidating, it has a valuable place where our students are headed when they transition to the workplace.

In this talk, we will present an overview of three projects stemming from our NSF-funded effort on engaged pedagogy for advanced cybersecurity education (NSF-DGE #1947295), namely: (i) DISSAV: Dynamic Interactive Stack Smashing Attack Visualization, a program visualization tool for teaching stack smashing attacks. DISSAV is a web-based application built with ReactJS; DISSAV provides a simulated attack scenario that guides the user through a three-part stack smashing attack.

PACE (Pathway to Advancement in Cybersecurity Education) is a guided Cybersecurity pathway that introduces dual enrollment college courses as early as 9th grade with multiple educational and employment exit points. PACE was funded for the last three years by a grant from the NSF-ATE. In this presentation we will summarize PACE outcomes and identify best practices for establishing a strong pathway program.  

The Jumpstart Program brings together a large local employer and the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) to enhance employment opportunities for both CSN and local high school students. It also assists the employer to meet the hiring needs in hard-to-find technical areas. Students that are part of the program that finish the required six (6) courses are guaranteed a job interview with the employer. This type of program has been successful with one program/employer and is now being expanded to additional programs and employers.