By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri Western State University will begin offering a cybersecurity degree even as high-profile cyber-attacks have been in the news.
Missouri Western President Elizabeth Kennedy says she began considering the new program after talking with an alum who turned a math and computer science degree into a 20-year career in international computer security.
“I spent some time talking with him and he graciously offered to help us design a program that’s going to be unique,” Kennedy says. “It’s not going to be just your generic, quote-unquote, cyber-security, but it’s going to focus on threat penetration, detecting that in ways that will provide graduates from our program a little bit of a cutting edge.”
Meat packer, JBS, paid an $11 million ransom after a cyber-attack shut the company down. Colonial Pipeline paid $5 million to cyber pirates and Solar Winds also suffered a cyber-attack that actually compromised a top cybersecurity firm.
Kennedy says the university is currently hiring faculty and creating labs. She says the program needs to incorporate IT professionals and networks.
“A lot of what the students may be doing will be in a network virtually,” according to Kennedy. “Looking at do we want to, for example, develop a cyber range? A lot of people say, ‘What’s a cyber range?’ and I say, well it’s kind of like a gun range, right? When you want to practice shooting your gun, you go to a gun range. Well, a cyber range is where you practice your cyber skills.”
Kennedy believes the program has great room for growth, because of the threat posed by computer hackers.
“It’s not only getting hacked, but it’s the ransomware that folks have been paying, whether it’s pipeline or a bank or another agency,” says Kennedy. “Being able to protect your data and doing so is very important. So, I think this is going to be very helpful for our region.”
The new program begins this fall on the St. Joseph campus with basic computer programming classes. Kennedy says it will slowly build as the university adds faculty and creates partnerships with IT firms.