A New for-Credit Class Planned, and Cyber Espionage out of Control!

I am working on proposing an new class on "Information Security Policy: The Challenges of Software, Hardware, And Humanware in the 21st Century."

The course will hopefully be taught out of one of the "hard" sciences (computer engineering, computer science) but be "user friendly" for folks who are NOT engineers. It will have lots of information from computer geeks, programmers, computer hardware architecture folks, forensics people, cyber-crime experts, national security types, as well as my own expertise on policy and human behavior content.

Why am I proposing this new class?

Because after getting feedback from the tens of thousands of folks attending one of our Identity theft workshops throughout the United States and Canada it became clear that there is too big a gap of knowledge between politicians and policymakers, citizens, business and law enforcement and the community of scientific experts (especially engineers) on the vulnerabilities of information protection.

Also, many of my former students have asked for a class that is not just soft social sciences but also has hard science insights for lay people on these topics. Stay tuned and sign up on this blog for updates on how that class is coming along.

Also see below why I think it is crucial that we up-armor our society on cyber security!

The article "Researchers Trace Data Theft to Intruders in China" NY Times April 5, 2010 is a fascinating and detailed look at cyber-espionage.

"In a report issued Monday night, the researchers, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, provide a detailed account of how a spy operation it called the Shadow Network systematically hacked into personal computers in government offices on several continents."

The report opens with this paragraph:

"Crime and espionage form a dark underworld of cyberspace. Whereas crime is usually the first to seek out new opportunities and methods, espionage usually follows in its wake, borrowing techniques and tradecraft. The Shadows in the Cloud report illustrates the increasingly dangerous ecosystem of crime and espionage and its embeddedness in the fabric of global cyberspace."

You can get the report "Shadows in the Cloud" at Scribd and you can download it as a pdf file.

http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php Don't look at this site unless you are a computer geek and have nerves of steele. It's the site that aggregates information about the Dark Side of the internet and has some scary statistics on viruses and hacking!

Please sign up on the right side of this blog for updates on continuing education seminars on ID theft and information security and the proposed new for credit class.