MSU Cyber Assessment Program enhances school district security
The program gives MSU students hands-on experience, while also providing a necessary cyber security checkup for school districts.
MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY, Miss. (WCBI) – If your district would like to sign up for the MSU Cyber Assessment Program, sign up using this link.
The MSU Center for Cyber Education has been assessing cyber security for school districts around Mississippi.
The MSU Cyber Assessment Program is free of charge, and is run mostly by students using a cyber security evaluation tool from the Department of Homeland Security.
They say schools are high value targets for hackers as their IT is often understaffed, and the information in their systems is highly sensitive.
Paul Luckett, the West Point School District IT director said everything in his district is run by technology.
“Every aspect of the experience in our district is driven by technology,” Luckett said.
From heating and cooling, to security cameras, and even grading systems, they are all connected to the internet.
And they can all be vulnerable to cyber attacks.
As important as defending against those attacks is having a plan once an attack has taken place said Shelly Hollis, the MSU Center for Cyber Education director.
“Just like any other plan that you have in place, whether it’s a tornado drill or a fire drill,” Hollis said. “You need to practice those regularly and go back through them and make sure nothing has changed that would get in the way of of executing a plan if something happened. And the same is true for cybersecurity.”
Luckett said the program enlightened them to their own insecurities.
“It’s really good to get a perspective other than your own so that you consider things that you would not have otherwise considered,” Luckett said. “And It helped us identify some blind spots that we thought were covered.”
Devin Chen, an MSU Cyber Assessment Program student program coordinator said their work is rewarding.
“It feels really wonderful to be able to go outside the classroom environment and be able to give back to these schools,” Chen said. “And see kind of the impact that our education is having on the community.”
The first step in protecting against attacks is understanding how the attackers operate said Gavin Seiler, an MSU Cyber Assessment Program student program coordinator.
“It allows us to better understand where we need to put our emphasis and focus on,” Seiler said. “Because there’s only so much money that you can spend on cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is a game about risk management. You can’t spend more money than what you’re trying to protect.”
Hollis said assessing school districts gives them tangible evidence to take to superintendents and school boards.
“They now have some data to say, ‘this is why this is important and why we need to spend the money to improve this piece of our cybersecurity.'” Hollis said.
Luckett said cybersecurity starts with educating the individual,
“Our digital hygiene does not just affect us, but it affects everyone that we work with,” Luckett said “So it’s really not a tech issue. It’s not an IT issue. It’s an everybody issue. Because the safer you are as an individual, the safer we are as a community.”
The team is able to provide this free service through a grant from the Department of Defense’s Viceroy program.
