Prince George??s, UM highlight cybersecurity
Source: Alice Popovici
As more and more national retailers deal with the threats of hacking and security breaches, Prince George’s County officials are doing their best to stay several steps ahead of would-be attackers.
“We actually have a full-time team that is looking for vulnerabilities throughout our infrastructure,” said Vennard Wright, chief information officer for the county. “The threats are always changing.”
Wright said he made cybersecurity his main priority beginning July 1, after discovering the county’s network had certain vulnerabilities that may have made it prone to attacks from hackers.
Although the system has never experienced a data breach, Wright said the five-person cybersecurity team now works to ensure the county’s practices are in line with industry standards for safeguarding sensitive information such as credit card payment data and health care records.
While October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, protecting sensitive information is a 24-7 task, say county cybersecurity experts.
Through October, the county is offering online cybersecurity training to its approximately 6,000 employees, as well as doing additional training with department heads regarding potential threats, Wright said.
Wright said he is paying particular attention to computer viruses containing malicious links, which may be sent to employees via email and can impact an entire network if the employee clicks on the link.
The University of Maryland, College Park, experienced its own cyber attack in February as University president Wallace D. Loh announced that 309,079 Social Security numbers, birth dates, university identification names and numbers were exposed in a data breach.
UM is in the midst of training the next generation of cybersecurity warriors as part of its Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students, or ACES, program.
“There’s a lot of applied knowledge of cybersecurity,” said Zhixiang Lin, 20, a UM sophomore, who added he hopes to work in a field that merges software engineering and cybersecurity. “That’s not something that you can get from reading textbooks.”
Lin is among 112 sophomores and freshmen who were invited to participate in the “living and learning” ACES program when they applied to the university, said ACES director Michel Cukier.
The students, who plan to major in fields as diverse as computer science, psychology, engineering, criminology and business, will graduate with diplomas in their respective majors and a citation in cybersecurity.
“You have a deficit of people working in cybersecurity, so you need to attract very, very talented people,” Cukier said of the four-year program that launched in 2013 and will continue adding incoming freshmen for the next two years. “What you do is, you reach out, you bring very different people into the field.”
At UMD’s Maryland Cybersecurity Center, researchers are working to make public networks more secure by studying the behavior of network users.
“I think there’s a great realization that the problems of cybersecurity aren’t only technical ones,” said Jonathan Katz, director the Maryland Cybersecurity Center who will lead the National Science Foundation-funded study along with David Maimon, a criminology professor. “There’s also, for example, understanding user behavior, understanding why users might take insecure actions.”
Katz said the yearlong study will look at the online behavior of Internet users such as doing banking while connected to a public network, whether they visit news sites mostly or whether they try to download harmful software in coffee shops, libraries and other public places that offer Wi-Fi across Maryland.
Katz said they will record the information without information which would identify the user.
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