SESA ’16 Summit Program

This presentation will discuss the approach used by UMUC, in keeping with its mission, to develop practical and useful educational programs, which provide the flexibility that students need and which are responsive to market needs. The continuing evolution of the Computer Networking & Cybersecurity undergraduate program will be used to illustrate our approach.

Organizations expend funds on new and improved IT systems with the hopes users will gain efficiency when performing their tasks using it. This presentation will explain a method an organization could use to increase the chances of realizing that efficiency by implementing a simple outcome-based training approach, including a case study of the steps, processes, and experiences used by one trainer to develop an enterprise-wide training program for an IT Service Management software system.

Recent high-profile cyber breaches such as the Target breach (2014) and the Anthem breach (2015) indicate that cyberattack is a clear threat nationwide. However, there are growing mismatches between industry needs and education provided by universities and colleges. In this paper, we present a newly designed cybersecurity course by dissecting recent cyber security breaches. This is a case-study based course, where cases come from the recent real-world cyber security attacks including the Target breach, the Anthem breach, a 300Gbps DDoS attack and others. Students will look into the details of these attacks and learn how these attacks happened from the beginning to the end. For each case study, students are expected to analyze the case study materials and prepare for the in-class discussion. Through guided discussion and hands-on lab assignments, students will explore various cyber security attack techniques, defense mechanisms and best practices. The evaluation results show that the course is very popular among students and received high evaluation results.

A recent decision to move our IS curriculum into cloud computing at Cal Poly Pomona raises many questions. Of specific concern at the start of this process was the training required for students in a cybersecurity track in the program. A decision was made that students must be not only users of cloud technologies but also purveyors as only through providing cloud services could students practice the full range of tasks and activities related to operating and securing cloud systems. This commitment led to the creation of a small data center that is operated and maintained entirely by students using cloud technologies. The dearth of published academic materials on systems administration, and specifically systems administration in a cloud context, sent faculty and students on a quest to understand what should be covered. This report follows more than a year of work and at what we believe is a mid-point in our endeavor.