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Teenagers Benefit from Cybersecurity Outreach September 2011
When you were 16 or 17 years old, did you know anything about vulnerability assessment, binary exploitation, or cryptographic concepts? Did you have enough cybersecurity knowledge to earn industry practitioner certificates by the time you graduated from high school? Today, thanks to MITRE, dozens of students are developing the skills and expertise needed to be knowledgeable cybersecurity specialists. Through an extensive community outreach initiative, provided by employees in Tampa and Colorado Springs, the company is embracing MITRE's STEM (science, math, engineering, and technology) goals—to create excitement in the engineering fields for current and future engineers—and is bringing a host of cybersecurity programs and activities to high school and college students. "Students from across the country are benefiting from our expertise in cybersecurity," says Kris Newport, department head, Tampa Operations. "We're making a difference." Getting Involved "Almost two years ago we decided to commit to a STEM outreach program—reaching out to our staff in Tampa as well as other MITRE locations," says Newport. "Before that, we had people involved in various activities, such as mentoring students here and there and judging Odyssey of the Mind competitions. With a more formalized approach, we knew we'd be able to do our part in motivating and encouraging interest in the engineering field." Today, the Tampa and Colorado Springs sites are working side-by-side with other MITRE teams as well as industry and academia partners to create a future pipeline of cybersecurity practitioners. "One part of our program focuses on Tampa high school students and the other reaches out to other high school and college students throughout the country," he explains. "Together, these programs create a network of activities that will benefit the world of cybersecurity." English, History, and Cybersecurity One of the Tampa office's most impressive and far-reaching STEM initiatives so far has been the site's creation of a four-year high school curriculum in cybersecurity. With the support of MITRE cyber engineers like Jon Palmer, members of the Tampa team worked with coursework from schools such as the Air Force Academy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and University of South Florida to create a program that could be tailored to high school students and would ensure students would be prepared to take industry certification exams—such as Comptia Security Plus and the (ISC)2 SSCP—by the end of their senior year. "We've been working closely with the Florida Department of Education and the non-profit Career Technical Education Foundation (CTEF)," explains Bob Cherinka, department head, Agile Engineering and Interoperability, who has led all of the STEM outreach activities in Tampa. "We began piloting the program with 20 students in June. If all goes well, four counties in Florida and one in Huntsville, Alabama, will be offering it to students starting in the fall of 2012." In the spring, the Tampa office participated in an industry engineering day sponsored by the CTEF. Site staff hosted more than 50 10th graders who had done research on various companies and had selected MITRE for their industry day host. "Students from two local schools came to MITRE for two and half hours. Besides introducing them to cybersecurity topics, we provided them with an overview of MITRE and our site, toured them around the facility and led various discussions, such as what's it like to be an engineer and what do we look for when we're hiring people," explains Cherinka. For fun, they invited kids to join in a marshmallow challenge. Participants were given marshmallows, spaghetti, string and tape and instructed to build a tower. The sophomores had varying degrees of success, and the winner built a structure 37 inches high. Capture the Flag While Tampa-area students have benefited from much of the company's cybersecurity STEM outreach, the support to students hasn't ended there. On July 19 and 20th, 26 teams of high school and college students—16 representing MITRE intern and co-op programs across the company (including teams from the high schools from Tampa) and 10 from schools such as University of Texas, University of California at Berkley, Brigham Young, and the University of Southern California—participated in a cybersecurity version of Capture the Flag (CTF). During the two day activity, players complete challenges to acquire special codes (flags) for points. Colorado Springs' Ryan Freckleton, a software application development engineer and coordinator for the CTF event, highlights two examples of activities in the challenge:
MITRE and its partners, Sypris Electronics, LLC and the CTEF, hosted the cyber challenge in a new cyber range that Sypris is establishing in support of continuing cyber education. In addition, MITRE cyber experts across the company provided participants with 40 hours of free "boot camp" training in preparation for the challenge "We designed this CTF to be a difficult, comprehensive activity," says Cherinka. "They not only had to have a good foundation in basic computing skills, they really needed to understand key aspects of cybersecurity. We covered it all: forensics, Web exploitation, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and cryptography." The winning team received a complimentary registration into the 2011 DEFCON cyber challenge, which is one of the largest cybersecurity conferences in the world. They also will be recognized at the (ISC)2 Security Conference in Orlando, Fla., in the fall and have an opportunity to take the Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) certification examination for free. "We wanted our efforts to be meaningful, and I think they are," says Cherinka. "I'm excited to see the fruits of our efforts taking shape. With these kinds of programs, we're making a difference for the future." —by Nadine Monaco Page last updated: September 1, 2011 | Top of page |
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