Forge Institute's Lee Watson (left), along with professor Philip Huff, say Arkansas is “at the culmination of a national revolution in cybersecurity and grid resiliency.” (Steve Lewis)
Armed with a $5 million federal grant and a regiment of interested students, an Arkansas university is building a cyber defense hub and talent pipeline to thwart computer attacks that have crippled hospitals, schools and businesses. is building.
The primary focus of this effort will be protecting the United States' power system.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Preparedness has allocated funding for further work at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Emerging Threat Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a type of cybersecurity clinic.
This grant is in addition to a $1 million grant announced in 2023.
“This grant will help build national infrastructure in Arkansas…which will expand our cybersecurity, energy, and industrial technology workforce and advance innovation and community cybersecurity services,” the analysis reads. said Philip Huff, assistant professor of computer science. Located in the heart of the Little Rock campus.
He and his team create workforce innovation and leverage the new skills of cybersecurity students to help companies, government agencies, and small utilities that lack resources for their own cybersecurity professionals. We want to protect cooperatives and other businesses.
“It's education, innovation and community service,” Huff said, likening the community service component to a program that uses health services students to treat patients in underserved areas.
Although the grant is only for one year, “the vision is to expand state and local provision for critical infrastructure security,” Dr. Huff said.
The need for more cybersecurity experts globally is “well-known,” the professor says. “Every business, every industry is affected. Every time you hear the news, another school, another hospital, or another county has been hit by ransomware. And it's been the same story for the last 10 years. must protect critical services such as power systems.”
Raid of the past, Defender of the future
In 2022, criminals took over the Little Rock School District's computer systems and forced them to pay approximately $240,000 in Bitcoin to regain control.
Legal fees for negotiations and consulting, as well as new threat detection software, brought the district's total expenses to nearly $700,000.
last week, arkansas business reported on the impact of a February cyberattack on health insurance billing and clearinghouse Change Healthcare that froze cash flow to hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies in Arkansas. There are many other examples.
“This problem goes beyond just the needs of the cybersecurity workforce,” Huff said. “Cybersecurity fits across the labor market. Students studying advanced automation technology, manufacturing, construction, and building automation can all benefit from it.
“Cybersecurity knowledge is extremely important in any field related to industrial technology. We can equip and upskill our students with skills they will need for the rest of their lives.”
UA Little Rock works with the Forge Institute, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and the UA System's five two-year colleges on the DOE grant.
Dr Huff said major work would begin next month. Students learn at their own pace to prove their skills and earn a certificate in 'Cyber Information Engineering'.
“Depending on the student, it may take three weeks.” [to finish]; Others might take a year, but we have that flexibility,” Hough said. “I think this is a much better approach. Students will be developing the skills that industry needs.”
Huff said the certification holders will have hands-on experience and knowledge of helping businesses in Arkansas protect their systems. “This is very similar to the health care worker shortage. Those students don't sit in front of a book all day and learn everything about health care. They're actively engaged in understanding how to help people better. We want to apply that model.”
Ultimately, this certification program could attract thousands of students. Currently, 100 of her undergraduate students are working toward degrees in cybersecurity at the UA Little Rock campus alone.
“Added value”
Students in industrial technology, engineering and related fields can earn cybersecurity certifications as a “value-add,” Huff said. “This is a national effort being led by the Department of Energy,” with collaboration from Auburn University, Georgia Tech, Idaho State University and others. “Programs will be competency-based, so instead of sitting in class for a semester and listening to long lectures, students will develop the competencies we expect after completing a certificate program. I can.”
And those are skills the industry is looking for, he said.
The $5 million grant will support what Hough called a “three-ring circus”: advances in artificial intelligence to combat cybercriminals' ever-increasing tricks, and a cyber-informed engineering certification curriculum. The idea is to fund the development of a new program with the Forge Institute in Little Rock. It has already become a stronghold against cyber attacks.
Forge Institute is establishing an Energy Innovation Center to enhance cybersecurity technology and commercialize it. The institute was founded in 2018 to strengthen the cybersecurity resiliency of local communities and the nation, and is dedicated to workforce development, innovation and research, according to Chairman and CEO Lee Watson. , which focuses on collective defense.
“Here in Arkansas, we are in the midst of a national revolution in cybersecurity and grid resiliency,” Watson said. arkansas business. Forge partnered with UA Little Rock, UA, and UAPB in 2019 to create the state's Cyber Innovation Consortium, focused on “aligning capabilities and efforts to have measurable impact” within and beyond Arkansas. Ta.
“This collaboration…represents a monumental leap toward protecting our nation's energy infrastructure,” Watson said, along with UA Little Rock President Christina Drehl, Huff, University of Arkansas professor Chris Farnell, and Grant Wangira, Interim Dean of the Graduate School. UAPB Arts and Sciences.
Both Huff and Watson also cited Sen. John Boozman's support for the program.
The Forge Institute will “not only foster early-stage ideas, but also lead the development of a national innovation center for grid security,” Watson said. “We are nurturing the seeds of national security and resilience.”
He hopes the Arkansas center will “become a beacon of American innovation and determination, paving the way for the rest of the country.”
Huff said the clinic model will allow students to work under close supervision to strengthen the cyber defenses and innovate power grid security for electric utilities, distribution cooperatives, public power districts, and local governments. He said he would give them an opportunity to help.
Huff said the Forge Institute will send students to work on technologies that utilities have developed in-house but lacked the resources to commercialize.
“The Department of Energy itself has a tremendous amount of intellectual property that it wants to move toward commercialization,” Huff said.
“We have a great partnership with them and with the Idaho National Laboratory,” he said of the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, which has been a center for nuclear research and power systems innovation for more than 50 years.
cyber nightmare
What kind of cyber attack is Huff most concerned about? Something that takes out large portions of the power grid. “The grid is usually very resilient and recovers very well [in the face of natural hazards like storms or extreme weather]” Hough said.
“But if an attacker damages very expensive equipment, such as a transformer, and a large number of equipment are rendered unusable, recovery becomes much more difficult.” He said distributed power infrastructure is an even softer target. “Therefore, as we develop new technologies for the power grid, there is a lot of room for innovation to protect these technologies.”
The Cybersecurity Clinic uses artificial intelligence, such as large-scale language models and autonomous reinforcement learning, to develop invisible cyber attack mitigation techniques.
“There's a company in Arkansas called Bustazo that has been working with us on grants,” Huff said. “They're leading that effort on the cybersecurity clinic side.” Vastazo, whose name means “burdensome” in Greek, said the project, known as eXExtracted Configuration Security, is funded through the BIRD Foundation and the state of Arkansas. It is also partnering with Israel's Salvador Technologies on conservation projects.
Huff said part of the big job ahead will be staying ahead of new global cyber attack techniques.
“It's a daily battle. There are nation states that are developing capabilities. You've probably heard that the People's Republic of China is developing the ability to attack the power grid. Recently, the FBI Director I have put this matter on record.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at a conference of cybersecurity experts on April 4 and described the agency's aggressive pursuit of cyber threats and constant pursuit of attackers.
“There is a threat to our power companies because they are on the front lines of international cyber warfare,” Huff said. “So what I think about new threats is new ways that they can threaten new technologies that are being introduced into critical infrastructure technologies. Artificial intelligence and other new technology trends that can be exploited. But we're also thinking about how we can use these technologies to better protect ourselves. Automating defensive actions is now much easier than before. Masu.”
