Teaching Cybersecurity Using the Cloud

Cloud computing platforms can be highly attractive to conduct course assignments and empower students with valuable and indispensable hands-on experience. In particular, the cloud can offer teaching staff and students (whether local or remote) on-demand, elastic, dedicated, isolated, (virtually) unlimited, and easily configurable virtual machines. As such, employing cloud-based laboratories can have clear advantages over using classical ones, which impose major hindrances against fulfilling pedagogical objectives and do not scale well when the number of students and distant university campuses grows up. We show how the cloud paradigm can be leveraged to teach a cybersecurity course. Specifically, we share our experience when using cloud computing to teach a senior course on cybersecurity across two campuses via a virtual classroom equipped with live audio and video. Furthermore, based on this teaching experience, we propose guidelines that can be applied to teach similar computer science and engineering courses. We demonstrate how cloud-based laboratory exercises can greatly help students in acquiring crucial cybersecurity skills as well as cloud computing ones, which are in high demand nowadays. The cloud we used for this course was the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. However, our presented use cases and approaches are equally applicable to other available cloud platforms such as Rackspace and Google Compute Engine, among others

Teaching About the Dark Web in Criminal Justice or Related Programs at The Community College and University Levels.

Increasingly, criminal justice practitioners have been called on to help solve breaches in cyber security. However, while the demand for criminal justice participation in cyber investigations increases daily, most universities are lagging in their educational and training opportunities for students entering the criminal justice fields. This article discusses the need to incorporate courses discussing the Dark Web in criminal justice. A review of existing cyber-criminal justice programs in Texas and nationally suggests that most community colleges and 4-year universities have yet to develop courses/programs in understanding and investigating the Dark Web on the internet. The Dark Web serves as the new “Criminal Underground” for illegal activity and needs to be understood. This research outlines the need for criminal justice programs to teach courses in the Dark Web and offer course recommendations. Recommended syllabi material for Dark Web courses in criminal justice, and recommendations for development of these programs are included

Sci-Tech Book News Reviews

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