In the News: Cybersecurity - It's about way more than countering hackers

11/3/2014 4:40:00 AM ITI Staff

It's tense in the situation room. A cyber attack on the electrical grid in New York City has plunged Manhattan into darkness on a day that happens to be the coldest in the year. Concurrently, the cellular phone network has been attacked, silencing smartphones and sowing confusion and panic. A foreign power has claimed responsibility for the attacks and says more are coming. Your job is to look at geopolitical factors, intelligence feeds, military movements and clues in cyberspace to predict what may be happening next. Your goal is to make a recommendation to the President.

Written by ITI Staff

The National Science Foundation recently wrote about ITI's Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program:

Bringing together cybersecurity, law and digital forensics

Also responding to the need for a cybersecurity workforce prepared to deal with today's complex problems is an SFS project for undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The project has graduated 25 students who are already working in government (reflecting another 100 percentage placement rate), and another 20 are set to graduate next May.

Since last year, this project offers scholarships to law students as well as engineering and computer science students. According to PI Roy Campbell, few lawyers understand cybersecurity and few computer scientists understand the legal framework involved in prosecuting and preventing cyber crimes.

The first law student to be accepted in the program, Whitney Merrill, is a recent law school graduate currently practicing as an attorney while completing her master's in computer science at UIUC. She found the combination of cybersecurity and law in the UIUC program to be valuable.

"The two fields are fiercely intertwined," said Merrill. "Understanding both fields allows me to better serve and advocate for my clients. Additionally, I hope to be able to help the two communities more effectively communicate with each other to create tools and a body of law that reflects accurately an understanding of both law and technology."

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This story was published November 3, 2014.