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.

A team of educators has been working on a cybersecurity curriculum framework (CCF). The purpose of the framework is to express a set of standards that stakeholders can use to develop a dedicated cybersecurity course for high schools. While computer science ideas and work are present in the framework, the CCF clearly delineates cybersecurity as its own topic. In the next phase of this project, the team hopes to develop methods for dual-credit and/or advanced placement so that students who take the course in high school can earn college credit for it.

This presentation is intended to cover the promotion of cybersecurity competitions by the Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). NSU first received its CAE designation in March 2005 amongst the first in the State of Florida and was redesignated in October 2014. The promotion of cybersecurity competition has long been in our agenda but was challenging, primarily due to the nature of students as many of them are working professional students.

It is a well-published concern that in order for the United States to maintain and expand its capabilities in the world of cybersecurity. Currently, there is a capacity issue: students cannot readily be added to the education system, especially at the community college level, because trained faculty are scarce. The weak link in the cybersecurity workforce supply chain is often finding faculty who can be effective and provide the proper encouragement to students to join the cyber workforce.

The purpose of this presentation is to compare existing online course designs and propose new pedagogical approaches to improve cybersecurity education. For this purpose, we chose three institutes that deliver online courses - one in WA and two in IL. The institute in WA delivers online MS in Cybersecurity (CSEC). The institutes in IL provides both online and on-campus courses for BS in Information Technology (IT) and Master of Business Administration (MBA). Campus visits and interviews were conducted for data collection purposes.

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.