STLCyberCon explores some of the latest trends in the world of cybersecurity
More than 150 folks attended the eleventh annual convention, organized collectively by school members in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Systems and Technology.
UMSL alum John Khotsyphom, now the supervisor of safety engineering at Netskope, presents Friday morning throughout STLCyberCon in the ED Collabitat. Khotsyphom mentioned methods his staff makes use of synthetic intelligence to make their safety work extra environment friendly. (Photos by Steve Walentik)
For greater than a decade, STLCyberCon has been bringing collectively business professionals, lecturers and college students and alumni from the University of Missouri–St. Louis to community and talk about new developments in cybersecurity.
“Academics get to learn about what’s new in practice, and practitioners get to see what academic research looks like,” mentioned Professor Dinesh Mirchandani, who has been half of the organizing committee since the convention’s founding. “The analysis poster displays give college students the alternative to share the work that they’re doing with a large viewers. It encompasses a job truthful. There’s one thing for everybody.
“There are very few conferences like STLCyberCon anywhere in the country, especially when you consider that it is free. It is a community conference and is really a place where everyone is welcome.”
More than 150 attendees turned out for the convention’s eleventh version Friday morning in the ED Collabitat on South Campus. Organizers Abde Mtibaa, Lav Gupta and Cezary Janikow from the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and Mirchandani in the Department of Information Systems and Technology in the Ed G. Smith College of Business as soon as once more assembled a slate of audio system desirous to discover some of the latest trends in the ever-evolving business.
Andy Maine, the director of IT, safety and compliance at Hussmann Corporation, discusses cybersecurity threats going through operational expertise throughout STLCyberCon.
Maine is a member of UMSL’s Information Systems and Technology Advisory Board.
“When we’re organizing, either we have set the theme and then asked them to come up with a talk on that theme, or we let them just decide on what the theme is,” Mtibaa mentioned. “When you just give them that freedom, you see that they are going toward what’s going on in the industry.”
This yr, that meant an incredible deal of dialogue about synthetic intelligence – the way it’s being utilized by cybercriminals trying to entry delicate information, the challenges it creates establishing belief and verification and its makes use of as a instrument for strengthening defenses.
“Whenever a new technology comes in, the first people who use it are crooks,” mentioned Raj Jain, the Barbara J. and Jerome R. Cox, Jr., Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, who delivered the convention’s keynote handle. “In the last year, when generative AI came in, I started getting about 10 times more spam than I used to get before. Why? Because they don’t have to do anything. They don’t even have to press the keyboard. They can just program an AI.”
As Jain defined, the phishing messages are additionally getting tougher to identify, and the potential to create and deploy deepfakes makes even the most refined customers extra prone to being tricked into turning over delicate information.
John Khotsyphom, an UMSL alum and supervisor of safety engineering at Netskope, described how he and his colleagues are utilizing Large Language Models and Model Context Protocol to make their safety efforts extra environment friendly.
“I use AI to automate the boring stuff,” Khotsyphom mentioned.
He defined that programming and deploying AI instruments at extra trivial duties can unlock prime expertise to give attention to the most complicated issues – structure, root trigger evaluation, figuring out the technique or the roadmap to safe a selected atmosphere.
Khotsyphom wasn’t the solely UMSL graduate amongst this yr’s audio system. Attendees additionally had an opportunity to listen to from Ashley Richmond, a former Tritons ladies’s basketball and volleyball participant who now serves as the vp for product administration at Mastercard. She and fellow Mastercard Vice President Amar Badrinarayan – an adjunct school member at UMSL – introduced on AI and managing threat.
Attendees of STLCyberCon included college students, school, alumni and practitioners from round the St. Louis area.
Not all the displays had been about synthetic intelligence. Andy Maine, the director of IT, safety and compliance at Hussmann Corporation, and a member of UMSL’s Information Systems and Technology Advisory Board, mentioned the significance of producers defending operational expertise, which has confronted growing threats in latest years.
Kurt Aubuchon, a former UMSL adjunct school member and now a senior intelligence analyst at CrowdStrike, walked attendees by a case research on monitoring a cybersecurity legal and the enterprise and moral points that play into the resolution of whether or not to out them publicly as soon as they’ve been recognized.
There had been additionally talks from Boeing’s Brett Cox on cybersecurity maturity mannequin certification in the protection industrial base and Dave Chronister of Parameter Security on new developments in ransomware.
The convention concluded with an alumni panel that includes latest graduates Joseph Bequette, a safety compliance analyst at Fortra; Tyson Hoang, a software program engineer at Mastercard who can also be enrolled in UMSL’s pc science grasp’s program in cybersecurity; and Jibril Anifowoshe, a senior cybersecurity engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance.
They all praised the information and assist they obtained as cybersecurity college students at UMSL, whether or not they had been in the pc science or data programs and expertise observe, and the community and connections they fashioned as college students that proceed to serve them in their careers.
UMSL has been coaching cybersecurity professionals for greater than a decade. The National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security have named the college a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education.
“We already have nationally ranked programs, but we want to bring them to everyone,” Mirchandani mentioned. “Having this conference enables us to share what we know, as well as the connections we’ve built over the years with the wider St. Louis community.”
