NSU Horizons Spring 2017

17 NSU HORIZONS “What we’re working on,” explained Levy about Aviv’s research, “is one of the fastest-growing problems that the FBI has identified. There is $5 billion lost every year for U.S. businesses because of business email compromise.” According to the FBI, business email compromise continues to grow, targeting businesses of all sizes. The scam is carried out, most often, through malicious mobile applications that are downloaded to executive devices. “Criminals learn the executive’s email communication patterns—who they communicate with, their writing style, lingo used, etc. Then, this executive authorizes a large payment for a vendor, the criminals change the bank account number and transfer the money out to another account,” said Levy— who is working with Aviv in developing experimentations to understand what factors can eventually lead executives to have the ability to detect business email compromise before it happens. “This is a typical Ph.D. program in the sense that the focus is on the student conducting research and we are teaching them to research problems that are impacting security now,” said Cannady. The college’s cybersecurity area has begun to obtain funding for research, he added. “This shows that agencies and businesses believe in what you’re doing enough to invest in it,’’ Cannady said. “They see that we have expertise, and they want us to help solve their problem. That’s really validation for what we are doing and what we’ve worked toward.” IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES In the Masters of Information Security Management program, Levy said students are tasked with solving problems as part of a capstone project, which he designed with feedback from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Secret Service, and human resources professionals that hire cybersecurity managers. “In all of the research that we do on every level, we’re trying to solve problems that we observe. We see the mounds of complaints the FBI is getting on specific cybersecurity issues, for instance, and we say, ‘this is a big problem, so how do we address that problem,’ ” said Levy. The projects fall under the umbrella of The Center for Information, Protection, Education, and Research at NSU’s CEC. To involve high school students interested in careers in cybersecurity, Levy and his students have been working with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, federal agencies, and local industry partners on organizing Cybersecurity Day and having them attend a day full of cybersecurity activities at the Nova Southeastern University Fort Lauderdale/Davie Campus. Currently, NSU does not have a program in cybersecu- rity for undergraduates; but, Levy said interest is growing in offering an undergraduate degree. Levy is a member of the National Joint Task Force on Cybersecurity Education, which was launched in September 2015, and is a collabo- ration of the Association for Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Com- puter Society, and the Association for Information Systems Special Interest Group on Security and Privacy. The task force is working to develop a model curricula for undergraduate cybersecurity programs, which will be released in December 2017. “The great benefit for students in any of our programs is that, unlike technical or managerial programs, which offer narrow perspectives on cybersecurity—usually technical—we bridge the two,” said Levy. “We open their eyes to the human-centric side of things, while they are studying inside a recognized Center for Aca- demic Excellence, which includes collaborative research that we do with federal and local agencies and shows our credibility.” Visit infosec.nova.edu/ or http://csec2017.org/ for more information. n Yair Levy: “The toughest nut to crack is the social engineering aspect of cybersecurity.”