Cyber security opportunities
With digital security breaches routinely making headlines and major companies —Home Depot, Target, Sony Pictures and Blue Cross Blue Shield parent Anthem — still reeling from hackings, the need for cybersecurity experts is only growing. A number of schools in the national capital region are responding to that need through graduate courses, certificates and degrees in the field.
At Marymount University, the two-year-old master’s in cybersecurity offers a degree program for students who don’t have a solid background in information technology; the dual-degree M.S. in information technology and cybersecurity is for those who do, whether through undergraduate work in computer science or engineering, or professional IT experience.
“Our approach is to make sure they understand not just the technical aspects, but also the policy aspects of it, the legal, the ethics, the management side of it,” says Diane Murphy, chair of Information Technology and Management Science at Marymount.
Once students have studied the basics of those components, they choose to specialize in either technical or management. Required courses include cryptography, computer network defense, cybersecurity law and information security management; among the electives are computer forensics and incident response, security and privacy of electronic documents, human considerations in cybersecurity and global cybersecurity.
Although they are allowed to take 33 of the required 36 credits via computer, in practice, says Murphy, students — who are primarily working adults — don’t want to take that many courses online. Marymount also offers a certificate program, with an 18-credit requirement, but most students who start there end up staying on to earn the full master’s degree.
The program has eight designated faculty members; their teaching is supplemented by long-term adjunct faculty, who come from some of the many organizations and agencies in the area, including the Department of Homeland Security, Navy Operations, Amazon and various government contractors. Coursework is supplemented with monthly workshops and lectures on emerging topics or fields of interest, with recent visitors from mobile security and cybersecurity in the energy sector. Murphy says there’s no shortage of interested speakers.
Brian Gallagher, who graduated with the program’s first class of four students last autumn, says the speakers are a real perk; another is the network among students earning a master’s in cybersecurity at any of the area institutions that offer it — particularly those who, like Gallagher, were recipients of the National Science Foundation’s Cybercorps: Scholarship for Service. Gallagher, who was working for a private security firm before earning his master’s degree, is now employed as an IT specialist in the Office of the Inspector General at the National Science Foundation. His classmates found or returned to jobs at Booz Allen Hamilton, Amazon Web Services and the FDIC.
The current class has some 30 students, and Murphy says Marymount’s next logical step will be a doctorate in cybersecurity for those professionals in the field who would like to transition to teaching. There’s also talk of combining cybersecurity with intelligence, through the forensic and legal psychology studies program that’s part of Marymount’s master’s in counseling.
“It’s another interesting area as we go more from defending to trying to get ahead of the game in intelligence,” says Murphy.
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