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PROVO — Deep in the basement of the Crabtree Technology Building at Brigham Young University, a team of students works to hack into the university’s servers.
However, these are not the stereotypical “hackers” and they are not doing anything illegal. These students are part of the award-winning Cybersecurity Research Lab and they are performing important functions not only at the university but around the community.
In the CSRL, students hack into systems at BYU. Different departments will ask the team to find security holes and try to find as much data and as many passwords as they can. The team then generates a report and tells the department how to fix it.
Team member Whitney Winders said cybersecurity has been ignored by industry until recently, and even then “people don’t see that their cybersecurity is lacking.” For example, the recent Target hack happened before the company even knew its servers had been infiltrated. Cyber espionage is an increasingly important issue for the government, with some estimates citing tens of billions of dollars lost from US companies because of Chinese hackers.
Recognizing that cybersecurity can be a career is another area where knowledge is lacking. Team Captain Laura Wilkinson added that “there’s deficiency in (the number of) cybersecurity people.”
Members of the CSRL were asked what led them to this program. Nate Baker said “it’s under advertised … it took me five years to find it” while studying electrical engineering. Another member was recruited by Wilkinson, while yet another stumbled upon the program through a BYU job fair.
The team works hard to overcome that lack of knowledge not only at BYU, but in the community. They go to numerous outreach events each year and put on a Girls Cybersecurity Camp.
Their efforts have paid off. Dale Rowe, an assistant professor and the director of the Cybersecurity Research Laboratory, said the program has grown from between five and seven students when he began in 2010 to between 20 and 30 students in 2016. Rowe said there was nothing on cybersecurity when he finished his education in 2003, and that he has worked hard when developing the program to include security throughout the entire BYU IT program.
The CSRL is not only growing, but unique in its mixed gender makeup. Rowe and the team have worked hard to recruit women to the program. They are currently 50-50 men and women. The team members said they found their research productivity doubled with that ratio and that mixed cyber security teams out performed male-dominated teams. Rowe said this fall the team will be majority female.
However, before the fall the team has some big work to do. They recently won a commanding first place at the 2016 Regional Rocky Mountain College Cyber Defense Competition, beating out teams from Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, New Mexico and Colorado. That win qualified them for a national competition in San Antonio on April 22nd. CSRL will travel to San Antonio with more women on its team than any other college.
If you want to get into cybersecurity, Wilkinson said it’s not as hard as people think and that “thinking on the fly” is an important part of success. Team member Jacob Crowther said the most important skill in cybersecurity is “curiosity.” And another member, Cara Cornel, added that you need to work hard and show people you’re interested.
The members of CSRL have worked hard to learn their skills and compete. They hope that students can look into cybersecurity as a career and want others to know the importance of what they do.
“It is no longer sufficient to have security by obscurity … we need good people with good intentions who want to improve our state of society to come into cybersecurity," Crowther said.
If you want to know more about the BYU cybersecurity program, visit https://cybersecurity.byu.edu. If you want to know more about the Girls Cybersecurity Camp, visit https://cybersecurity.byu.edu/summercamp.
Carrie Rogers-Whitehead is a senior librarian at Salt Lake County Library. In addition, she is an instructor at Salt Lake Community College and CEO and co-founder of Digital Respons-Ability. Carrie can be reached at carrie@respons-ability.net
