Contact: Leah Barbour
Photo by: Megan Bean
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State University's annual Cybersecurity Awareness Week enables students, faculty, staff and others to learn protection strategies from some of the field's most distinguished authorities.
MSU offers one of the top three cybersecurity-training programs in the nation, and the Bost Extension Center theater was full when the "Who Is Keeping Your Information Secure? And How?" panel convened on Thursday [Nov. 6].
Featured speakers were Trey Breckenridge, director of MSU's Malcolm A. Portera High Performance Computing Center; Dave Dampier, professor and director of the Distributed Analytics and Security Institute; and Tom Ritter, campus security and compliance officer. Tommy Morris, associate professor and associate director of DASI, moderated the panel.
They encouraged attendees to use good passwords with a variety of letters, cases and characters, and they emphasized the importance of encrypting mobile devices.
"I actually choose a phrase--one of my favorite phrases--and I use the first character of every word in that phrase, change up the case and add a few special characters," Morris said. "Then I have a password that's easy to remember, but no one is likely able to guess that password."
Breckenridge emphasized the importance of physical protection. Use strong passwords, leave computers locked and don't allow easy physical access to places where sensitive information is secured, he said.
"The most common thing I see day in, day out, year in and year out is, the attackers ask for passwords, and people will provide them," Ritter said. "We have to work hard to protect our students and our users and our data, and the MSU policy is, do not give out you password."
MSU's newest major cybersecurity initiative, DASI, has received approximately more than $5 million in research monies to build more depth among the cybersecurity programs and research already taking place at MSU, Dampier said.
"There are national labs, national security agencies and national intelligence agencies that have labs like ours, but we still have the most extensive university-based Critical Infrastructure Protection Lab in the country and probably in the world," Dampier said. "We are able to do big projects and tackle those grand challenges in cybersecurity, so we're ready to build DASI slowly and smartly."
MSU's Office of Research and Economic Development sponsored the panel session.
Learn more about Cybersecurity Week at MSU at http://www.infosecurity.msstate.edu/csa/.
MSU is online at www.msstate.edu, facebook.com/msstate, instagram.com/msstate and twitter.com/msstate.