It’s easy to overlook the myriad of ways technology has inundated our lives. There are obvious things, like smart phones and computers with wireless capabilities, and of course, the Internet itself.
But computers also communicate over computer networks in other ways, from banking to controlling the power grid which supplies our electricity.
This tangled labyrinth of sophisticated systems, cyberspace, has become essential to modern life, making it an attractive target for hackers. So much so that three years ago, President Barack Obama called cyber threats “one of the most serious economic and national security threats our nation faces.”
On the forefront of the fight for cyber security are students from Mississippi State University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, which offers a range of programs, from computer security to digital forensics.
Dr. Rayford Vaughn Jr., associate vice president for research at MSU and former head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department, gave a brief overview of the department’s offerings and accomplishments during Tuesday afternoon’s Columbus Rotary Club meeting at the Columbus Country Club.
In 2001, MSU was among the first universities in the nation to be designated a national Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. The school maintains a rigorous set of national security certifications, and many students and faculty hold various levels of security clearance.
MSU offers the third largest cyber security scholarship program in the country, Vaughn said. In exchange for two years of service with federal agencies, scholarship recipients receive paid tuition, a $20,000 per nine-month stipend, a summer internship and guaranteed employment with the federal government.
Vaughn said he never has trouble placing the students — the government is often waiting to recruit them.
MSU is also one of only five universities in the nation to offer digital forensics, which teaches students to solve computer security crimes. More than 5,000 law enforcement officers have been trained at MSU’s National Forensics Training Center. Through the Wounded Warrior project, military veterans who have been injured are also eligible to undergo training through the program.
“I know of no other place where federal, state and academia work together in one facility addressing cyber crime,” Vaughn said.
Every day, our nation’s most vulnerable systems are being attacked, but they can be made more secure, and that’s the point of the students’ research. MSU students have even exposed vulnerabilities in large corporations like General Electric and unraveled real-life cyber crimes.
In 2009, MSU grad student and researcher Wesley “Weasel” McGrew exposed a Texas hacker who bragged on YouTube about installing malware on a Texas hospital’s computers, some of which controlled the hospital’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning unit. His plot, if it had been carried out, would have threatened public health and safety, medicines and other systems.
McGrew gave the information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Jackson, and the hacker, Jesse William McGraw (no relation), is now serving out a 110-month sentence in federal prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release and $31,881.75 in restitution he must pay to the hospital.
Carmen K. Sisson is the former news editor at The Dispatch.
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