2.13.24
Hidden Factors
Looking for a couch for the student lounge just outside his Beggs Hall office wasn’t listed as a job duty in 2019 when Joe Jabara ’85, newly retired from 30 years in the U.S. Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Kansas Air National Guard, accepted the directorship of Wichita State’s Hub for Cybersecurity Education and Awareness (HCEA). An administration of justice graduate, an attorney and a certified threat intelligence analyst, Jabara was well prepared to take up the responsibilities of his new position. And he already knew he’d be facing HIDDEN FACTORS.
“I thought I’d teach a class or two,” he says about his post-military return to campus almost five years ago now. With a teaching load that includes such courses as Cybersecurity Essentials, Human Threats in Cybersecurity, and Competitive Ethical Hacking, Jabara has headed up WSU’s cybersecurity program since 2020.
Begun in 2017 and based out of the School of Computing within the College of Engineering, the program started with five students. In 2022, it graduated a class of 21 – all of whom, Jabara is quick to note, found work almost immediately in the hyper-burgeoning cybersecurity industry. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average job outlook across all occupations sits right at 5%, but for cybersecurity professionals that percentage is much higher and projected to rise over the next few years to 32%. Globally, cybersecurity job vacancies have grown 350% since 2013, from a million openings to 3.5 million in 2021, and industry experts expect that number to hold steady through at least 2025.
“Our No. 1 priority is growing young professionals into this workforce,” Jabara says about the key aim of WSU’s cybersecurity program, which, in addition to Jabara, has three full-time faculty members: Tom Ensz, Sergio Salinas and Tania Jareen ’14. Jabara reports that program graduates have found “gainful employment” at organizations worldwide, where they deploy their applied computing and white-hat hacking skills to protect the critical data assets of their employers against cyber threats.
One of those gainfully employed Shocker graduates is Meshari Aldossary ’22, who is a security intelligence center analyst at the Sadara Chemical Co., headquartered in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Another is his brother, Thamer Aldossary ’22, a computer engineer at Saudi Aramco.
Among program grads from the class of 2022 who’ve found work closer to their alma mater are Noah Santry, software developer at WSU Tech; Brendan Albright, Jacob Cromly and Jon Schoelwer, analysts at Koch Industries; and Dakota Rockers, IT consultant at Arc Technologies Group, Wichita.
“In the past two years, I’ve been able to meet and help people from many different industries all over the world,” Rockers says. “Personally, the skills and abilities I learned at WSU surrounding industrial controls enabled me to understand and address the needs of manufacturing of any kind when it comes to securing them against digital threats.”
wannacry
Unleashed May 12, 2017, WannaCry is an example of self-propagating crypto ransomware, a type of malware used by cybercriminals to extort money. The attack infected computers in more than 150 countries and caused an estimated $4 billion in losses. Moreover, variants are still active.
“What got me interested in cybersecurity,” says Nick Ridpath ’22, who works for Cyderes, a cybersecurity firm with operation centers and offices across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and India, “was growing up around computers and learning more about them. If there was a big event that really got me into it, it would probably be when WannaCry ransomware started spreading. It got me interested in learning more about malware, hacking and the security of it.”
Motives for creating and deploying malware range from idle criminal mischief to financial gain to nation-state espionage, with “80 to 90 percent” of all cybercrime being money-making schemes, Jabara says. Bad actors, the black-hat hackers of cyberspace, launch tens of thousands of incidents annually, relying on cryptomining, phishing, ransomware and Trojan horse techniques to do the bulk of their dirty work.
Globally, the overall cost of cybercrime is projected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Cybercriminals, Jabara says, are constantly on the look out for ways to exploit and mine weak points in the digital landscape, especially now as individuals, companies and other organizations further digitize their operations, expand reliance on Internet of Things (IoT) and other network-connected devices, and collect and store more and more data in the cloud.
After factoring in the heightened geopolitical issues and divisive societal concerns of recent years, there has never been a time of greater need for white-hat cybersecurity professionals, firms and R&D facilities and collaborations. One such collaboration, Jabara points out, is WSU’s partnership with Knowmadics, a Virginia-based software development company that already has a strong Shocker connection. In 2022, the firm set up its Cyber Center of Excellence at downtown Wichita’s Groover Labs, which was co-founded by software engineer Curt Gridley ’80.
Working through WSU’s National Institute for Research and Digital Transformation (NIRDT), the joint WSU-Knowmadics initiative is designed to identify vulnerability factors in satellite operations. The goal is to up the security of data collection and transfer among space-based IoT devices – in other words, to block black-hatters before they even boot up.
mydoom
Created to make zombies out of computers, MyDoom took over more than 500,000 computers in the week after its Jan. 26, 2004 release, costing businesses over $38.5 billion in damages so far. Although well past its notorious heyday, traces of the malware still lurk in the cybersphere.
“I got interested in cybersecurity once I learned I could make a career out of being an ethical hacker,” says Jake Bivens ’22, a Red Team security engineer at Millennium Corp. in Huntsville, Ala. “As a security engineer, I’m tasked to replicate Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) to help increase the cyber safety of our customers.”
Assessing threats has long been a focus for Jabara. After graduating from Washburn University School of Law in 1988, he joined the U.S. Air Force. Assigned to McConnell AFB, he was chief of military justice and area defense counsel before going into the Air Force’s individual mobilization augmentee (IMA) program. In 1998, he transferred to the Kansas Air National Guard (KANG) and served as staff judge advocate, mission support group commander and vice commander/wing commander, 184th Intelligence Wing. He retired as KANG chief of staff with the rank of colonel. “I’ve reinvented myself more than the telephone,” he says.
At WSU, he continues to command and strategize, but now the mission support groups he leads are aligned with the National Cyber League (NCL), which hosts online team competitions for students interested in cybersecurity. According to the NCL, 15,314 students competed during the fall 2023 season, and Jabara, whose job duties include coaching WSU’s NCL teams, says he’s proud of the result: Based on strong performances by 15 Shocker teams, the College of Engineering was ranked 18th nationally out of 521 colleges and universities in the Cyber Power Rankings.
code red
Displaying the text string “Hacked by Chinese!”, CodeRed wormed its way into some 2 million computers, causing an estimated $2.75 billion in clean-up costs and lost productivity. Released July 12, 2001, the original worm stopped propagating on July 28 when it went into Infinite Sleep Mode. But there are variants.
There’s no sleep mode, Jabara says, for cybersecurity pros like Regan Archibald ’22, Sarafina Collins ’22, Traecy Freeman ’22, Ethan Hanks ’22, Charles Kohring ’22, Matt Minter ’22, Michael Reneau ’22, Connor Sites ’22, Cameron Smith ’22, Duncan Snook ’22, Jeff Stanley ’05/21 and Nathan Wallace ’22.
But, if he can wrangle it up to Beggs Hall’s second-floor lounge area, students there can catch some rest on a 10-foot-long, white, pleather couch – in need of patches.
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