Industry and faculty surveys call for increased collaboration to prepare information technology graduates

Academic and industry collaborations can help improve computing curricula and student learning experiences. Such collaborations are formally encouraged by accreditation standards. Through the auspices of ACM and IEEE-CS, the IT2017 task group is updating curriculum guidelines for information technology undergraduate degree programs, similar to the regular updates for other computing disciplines. The task group surveyed curriculum preferences of both faculty and industry. The authors, with the group\u27s cooperation, compare US faculty and US industry preferences in mathematics, IT knowledge areas, and student workplace skill sets. Faculty and industry share common ground, which supports optimism about their productive collaboration, but are also distinct enough to justify the effort of actively coordinating with each other

SecurityCom: A Multi-Player Game for Researching and Teaching Information Security Teams

A major portion of government and business organizations’ attempts to counteract information security threats is teams of security personnel. These teams often consist of personnel of diverse backgrounds in specific specialties such as network administration, application development, and business administration, resulting in possible conflicts between security, functionality, and availability. This paper discusses the use of games to teach and research information security teams and outlines research to design and build a simple, team-oriented, configurable, information security game. It will be used to study how information security teams work together to defend against attacks using a multi-player game, and to study the use of games in training security teams. Studying how information security teams work, especially considering the topic of shared-situational awareness, could lead to better ways of forming, managing, and training teams. Studying the effectiveness of the game as a training tool could lead to better training for security teams

An Academic Approach to Digital Forensics

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: O. Angelopoulou, and S. Vidalis, “An academic approach to digital forensics”, Journal of Information Warfare, Vol. 13(4), 2015. The final published version is available at: https://www.jinfowar.com/journal/volume-13-issue-4/academic-approach-digital-forensics © Copyright 2017 Journal of Information Warfare. All Rights Reserved.Digital forensics as a field of study creates a number of challenges when it comes to the academic environment. The aim of this paper is to explore these challenges in relation to the learning and teaching theories. We discuss our approach and methods of educating digital forensic investigators based on the learning axioms and models, and we also present the learning environments we develop for our scholarsPeer reviewe

Demonstrating Operating System Principles via Computer Forensics Exercises

We explore the feasibility of sparking student curiosity and interest in the core required MIS operating systems course through inclusion of computer forensics exercises into the course. Students were presented with two in-class exercises. Each exercise demonstrated an aspect of the operating system, and each exercise was written as a computer forensics investigation. Students were asked to indicate their perception of the practicality of the course material before and after completing the exercises. Based upon a t-test, we conclude that students find the course material to be of greater practical significance when course materials are linked to forensics topics

Faculty Senate Chronicle February 10, 2022

Minutes for the regular meeting of The University of Akron Faculty Senate on February 10, 202

Topological Data Analysis for Enhancing Embedded Analytics for Enterprise Cyber Log Analysis and Forensics

Forensic analysis of logs is one responsibility of an enterprise cyber defense team; inherently, this is a big data task with thousands of events possibly logged in minutes of activity. Logged events range from authorized users typing incorrect passwords to malignant threats. Log analysis is necessary to understand current threats, be proactive against emerging threats, and develop new firewall rules. This paper describes embedded analytics for log analysis, which incorporates five mechanisms: numerical, similarity, graph-based, graphical analysis, and interactive feedback. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is introduced for log analysis with TDA providing novel graph-based similarity understanding of threats which additionally enables a feedback mechanism to further analyze log files. Using real-world firewall log data from an enterprise-level organization, our end-to-end evaluation shows the effective detection and interpretation of log anomalies via the proposed process, many of which would have otherwise been missed by traditional means