The annual Cyber Discovery Day – an event hosted by the Cybersecurity Education, Research and Outreach Center (CEROC) took place last Saturday ( Sept 7th ). It was another successful event organized by the Cyber people from CEROC. The event is primarily for the freshmen who are already in cyber or interested to join this world. This event gives them the chance to learn more about cybersecurity resources and opportunities available here at Tech.

The event kicked off with Mr. Eric L. Brown, the assistant director of CEROC introducing a speaker panel. It was a remote panel and cyber alumni from different part of the country joined to welcome the new students and talk about their experiences. They talked about their current jobs and responsibilities.

The panel discussed how being part of the cyber world helped them reach their goals. Moreover, they talked about the opportunities and resources they had and how to best use them. After the speaker panel, Mr. Eric introduced CEROC and what role it plays to help the students become better professionals. He also talked briefly about all the other diverse things that the center is involved in. After a short break, there was two student panel that talked about all the cyber activities they are involved in. The first panel talked about crowdsourcing learning. They presented all the security interest groups – offense, defense, and CTF. These are student groups interested in the particular field of security learning together and getting involved with different competitions. These security interest groups are all about the students and their ideas. They create different labs and tasks among themselves to help each other learn something new and grow as a team. The second student panel involved some of the students that received different scholarships through CEROC. They talked about how they got involved and what lead them becoming an SFS or DOD scholar.

After this, the students enjoyed a networking lunch with all the other students and participants. Later some students supported by CEROC presented their research work and how they are implementing cybersecurity in different domains of computer science. The last activity was a Capture the Flag event created by the CTF team for the freshmen. It allowed them to have an experience of a CTF competition. Students were divided into teams of two and four teams were given gifts for having the highest scores.

Dr. Ambareen Siraj – CEROC director came in later in the day despite being very sick as she concluded the event by summarizing the day and thanking everyone for being part of Cyber Discovery Day.