Based on the growing number of security and data breaches that are occurring on a daily basis, as well as the impact they are having on our lives, security is no longer working, so as a community of users, we must take charge and reestablish control of our own security and privacy. Unfortunately, due to these frequent occurrences, people now bear a mindset that security is too complex and seem resigned to the fact that security breaches are just a part of their daily lives as they know it. For the most part, they are correct!

To increase national security for the U.S. and meet its workforce needs, cybersecurity education must develop new knowledge and skills. To address this need, the Cyber Up! Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) project at Coastline Community College in California will research, create, adapt, adopt, and implement a suite of course content that supports a Certificate of Achievement and an Associate of Science degree. The three-year project will run 10/2018-09/2021 (NSF ATE Award #1800999). 

Cyber threat hunting has emerged as a critical part of cybersecurity practice. However, there is a severe shortage of cybersecurity professionals with advanced analysis skills for cyber threat hunting. Sponsored by NSA, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) and Forsyth Technical Community College (Forsyth Tech) have been developing hands-on teaching materials for cyber threat hunting that will expand our current strong educational programs in cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity education often feels fragmented because of its broad spectrum which includes theoretical principles, cyber hygiene, board-level decision-making, and highly specialized technical skills.  Workforce and academic training will benefit from cybersecurity instructors who position multi-faceted topics through the single lens of risk management. Effective programs do not seek to eliminate cyber risk, but to manage it appropriately.

This presentation first discusses the introduction of cyber labs into existing graduate embedded systems and undergraduate microcontroller system design courses. A Raspberry-PI based platform was used to develop a set of six labs for the graduate embedded systems course required to be taken by all MS in Electrical Engineering and MS in Computer Engineering students. Additionally, Python as the programming language, Linux as the operating system, and concepts of security are introduced in the graduate course.

Hands-on labs are a critical component of any cybersecurity program. Schools can develop labs internally, outsource labs to a provider, or utilize free grant resourced labs, or use free and open source labs.  Many externally provided labs aren’t mapped to CAE Knowledge Units or the NICE Framework, especially the open source labs. This makes it challenging for schools to identify the right labs for their program and requires extensive efforts to map the labs to meet these different requirements.

Cybersecurity has become a prevalent topic in many colleges, but how it should fit into the overall educational process is still not fully understood. A cybersecurity project at the University of Hawaii Maui College (UHMC), funded by the NSF SFS program, spans multiple disciplines and targets women and minorities. The goal of this project is to ensure that a broad audience of faculty, students and practitioners get trained in the fundamentals of cybersecurity.

The field of cybersecurity is predicated on the existence of humans who deliberately attack computer systems. In other words, without cyber adversaries, there is no cybersecurity.

The Joint Task Force (JTF) on Cybersecurity Education (http://cybered.acm.org/) was launched in September, 2015 as a collaboration between major international computing societies: ACM, IEEE Computer Society, AIS’s Special Interest Group on Security (SIGSEC), and IFIP. The purpose of the JTF on Cybersecurity Education was to develop comprehensive model curricular recommendations for undergraduate program in cybersecurity education that will support future program development, and associated educational efforts.

In this talk, we will present the Society of Women in Cybersecurity (SWiCS), a less than one-year-old club. SWiCS is energized and ran by CSUSB students of The Jack H. Brown College of Business. The main aim of the club is to attract women to the technical field and especially to cybersecurity. SWiCS is a community of students (all genders) supporting each other through every step of their career, from school duties to job hunting. The aim of the club is to supplement classroom curricula through study groups, workshops, mentoring, networking, and internship/job placement assistance.