CHENEY – Eastern Washington University has been awarded $2.8 million to bolster their Cybersecurity program. The money will be used to create an undergraduate degree in Cybersecurity as well as a master’s program for Cyber operations.
Eastern not only focuses on Cybersecurity as a whole but how rural communities such as Cheney need to prepare for Cybersecurity breaches just like large corporations do. Any business that houses information can be a target. Cybersecurity issues can be anything as small as credit card phishing scams to large scale infrastructure attacks.
While most rural communities don’t have to worry about large infrastructure attacks, they do have to worry about everyday digital attacks, like ransomware for instance.
“That’s the big hazard for a lot of small towns is someone gets some ransomware and because their systems aren’t protected well enough and they have to lose all their data unless they pay an amount of money they don’t have,” said Dave Bowman, dean of the College of Science, Technology,
Engineering, and Mathematics at EWU.
Bowman said the expanded undergraduate and master’s programs in the Cyber defense field will help address local communities Cyber defense needs. He added one of Eastern’s professors Stu Steiner is already working with local water districts to help them defend against hackers. This funding will only hope solidify their expertise to continue to help rural communities in these areas.
“Cyber operations will evolve all of us in a bit of a different direction,” Bowman said. “Cyber defense is basically monitoring to keep bad guys out. Cyber operations pretend to be bad guys so that they can find the weaknesses before somebody else does.”
Bowman likened Cyber security to curative medicine and Cyber operations to preventative medicine saying it’s the act of identifying holes in Cyber defense and strengthening them before they become exploited by bad actors. Bowman said devices as seemingly innocuous as a Ring doorbell camera could be exploited in a manner that could jeopardize the internet grid for an entire community. He said it’s a cyber operators job to truly consider everything with a digital system as a potential threat or weak spot.
“Let’s say you have one of those Ring doorbells that’s basically a system, that’s a cyber threat too but in a different way, Bowman explained.
Bowman said a bad actor could access your doorbell and have it repeatedly try to send video request calls to the server.
“That doesn’t do anything to your doorbell, but what it does it shut down your local internet—‘cause if you do it at not just your house but at your neighbor’s— you get what’s called these distributed denial service attacks,” Bowman said. “So that can have a regional affect for something that you would never think about.”
According to Bowman, Eastern has been recognized as an NSA center for academic excellence at cyber defense thanks in part to professor Steiner’s efforts in evolving the Cybersecurity program at the university.
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