Fall 2015 – Page 2 – Seidenberg School News

Experts to talk Threat Intelligence at cybersecurity symposium

On Friday, October 30, 2015, we welcome a panel of renowned experts who will speak about threat intelligence to an audience of more than 100 students who are passionate about cyber security and digital forensics.

During the sold-out event, organized by Dr. Darren Hayes, the Director of the Seidenberg Cybersecurity Institute, we will hear from incredible speakers who will share their experiences across the field:

Joel Krauss, the Director of Strategic Information & Crisis Management for the International Rescue Committee, will be giving a talk called Human Intelligence: A Holistic Approach. This talk will focus on leveraging organic intelligence-gathering assets within one’s own organization in order to answer organizational risk information (ORI) priorities.

Ian Amit, Vice President at ZeroFox, will give a presentation titled Actionable Threat Intelligence. Ian’s talk will discuss how to create a customized, organization-specific threat intelligence feed, which in turn will be used to actively increase the security posture of the organization in a measurable way.

Joshua Philipp, who is a National Security Reporter, China News, at Epoch Times, will be an explanation of the vast system behind Chinese economic espionage, and how it is carried out by military, civilian, government, business, and academic sectors in China. The talk is called Cyber and Beyond: The Inner Workings of Chinese Economic Espionage – quite the exciting title!

The final talk will be by Lenny Zeltser, Product Management Director, NCR Corp, with an Introduction to Malware Analysis. In this session, Lenny Zeltser demonstrates key aspects of this process, walking attendees through behavioral analysis of a real-world Windows malware specimen by using several free tools. He will demonstrate practical techniques in action and how malware analysis will help to triage the incident to assess key capabilities of the malicious software.

The event will take place from 12:15-5:30 at Lecture Hall North and promises to be an incredible afternoon of presentations, discussion, and learning.

Thinking about attending the Seidenberg School? Join us for the Undergraduate Open House in NYC

If you missed the Undergraduate Open House in Pleasantville, another opportunity to check out why you should consider Pace is coming up in NYC. The fall Open House will take place on Sunday, November 15, and we are aiming to provide a fantastic experience that showcases what greatness awaits you at Pace University.

At the Pleasantville event, potential applicants attended in swathes to enjoy tours, presentations and an open floor where all of their questions could be answered. Plenty of the Seidenberg faculty and staff were on hand, as well as a significant number of wonderful Seidenberg students who came to spread the word to prospective students. The Open House was a massive success, and we’d like to repeat the show in NYC.

Here’s a rundown of what you can expect to find at the NYC Open House:

Campus and resident hall tours
Students sharing their internship and professional experiences
In depth information about Seidenberg majors (and other Pace majors!)
Student clubs and activities
Financial aid and scholarships advice
Fun!

For registration, directions and program information, head over to the main Pace website. And if you’re planning to attend? Register now! Don’t forget to tweet us, like us on Facebook, share pics with us on Instagram and use the hashtag #PaceBound!

Seidenberg students fight poverty at Google hackathon

On October 8, 2015, a team of Seidenberg students descended on Google HQ for a day of impromptu coding. The event was for a good cause: Techo, a non-profit organization that seeks to overcome poverty in slums, needed some help building an app that would make gathering information about families living in slums easier.

Techo is present in 22 countries in Latin America and works in over 670 slums every single week. It has implemented 450 community working groups thanks to the help of over 80,000 volunteers (with 800,000 volunteers having been involved to date). The organization has built over 105,000 transitional houses and 6,000 permanent houses, which can massively impact the lives of people living in slums. As if all that wasn’t enough, Techo seeks to empower families through education and community-building: 17,000 adults graduated in basic skills training programs and 26,000 children participated in educational programs thanks to Techo.

Google hosted the event, and representatives from Techo and the television network Univision were there to steer (and record) the hackathon. Pace people present included Jigar Mehta, Dhruvil Gandhi, Virali Jhaveri, Robert Plumly, Vaibhav Dubey, Ethan Garrison, Hana Stanojkovic, Barak Michaely, Eiman Ahmen, Ava Posner, Hardik Patel, Jan Schoepp, Trong Le, Ritesh Pathak, and Preston Rollins.

The problem to solve was as follows: Techo workers collect information about the needs and conditions of the families they help by asking a series of questions. The answers are recorded by hand, and are entered into a database and organized so Techo can establish an action plan. However, due to the strict organization of the questions against the conversational speech style of the interviewees, this method is highly inefficient and keeps Techo from spending more time actually doing the good work.

Seidenberg students were on hand to help fix this problem.

Techo already has an app that contains the questions, but it needed improvement in order to be efficient. The Seidenberg team split into three groups – one working on the front end, one on the database, and one on the form containing questions itself. Due to the nature of the hackathon, the team only had around 6 hours to work on the project – but they succeeded in improving opening the app, cutting out unnecessary questions and making the usability simpler.

It could be up to Seidenberg Creative Labs to finish the job!

Learn more about Techo and donate!

Alumnus Doug Kandl talks cybersecurity at Seidenberg

Seidenberg alumnus Doug Kandl visited the Seidenberg School at both Pace campuses this week. To audiences at Pleasantville and NYC, Doug gave presentations on his work with the US Army, the MTA, and more – with a focus on cybersecurity. He spoke about the state of the Department of Defense’s use of technology and where it hopes to be in the future.

Doug works in the Cyber Center of Excellence, with the responsibility of training the signal force and the cyber force, as well as working on future developments that allow soldiers to do the best job with the best technologies.

He also spoke about the opportunities available to Seidenberg students, who can apply for scholarships that will allow their tuition to be paid for by the US Government, along with a stipend. Those interested can also check out USAJOBS.gov for internship opportunities. The US Army has several partnerships with Pace – Research and Development, Development of Courseware, and Internships.

After speaking about his job specifically, Doug moved on to discussing general trends in cybersecurity, such as innovative ways cyber criminals are hacking into systems. One such path was through supply chain infiltration, so instead of attacking an organization directly, hackers will infiltrate somewhere along the supply chain in order to get into the system more covertly.

Doug’s presentations were very informative and we are delighted to have had him return to Pace to be our cybersecurity expert in residence!

Douglas Kandl ’14 holds a bachelor’s in Information Technology, a master’s in Information Systems, and was a scholar in the Department of Defense Information Assurance Program. During his time at Pace’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Doug gained several excellent internships, including working for Standard & Poor’s and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. On arrival at Pace in 2010, Doug immediately began work on revitalizing Pace’s struggling Jewish student organization, Hillel, with great success. Thanks to his many academic achievements, Doug currently works at the Department of Defense, where he applies and expands his expertise in cybersecurity on a daily basis.

Anthony Martini ’16 attends BlackHat conference in Vegas

Seidenberg’s own Anthony Martini (MS-CS ‘16), recipient of the NSF CyberCorps scholarship for service, recently attended the prestigious Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is the fourth information security conference that Anthony has attended in the last two and a half years, thanks to the support of CyberCorps and other scholarships.

Read on for Anthony’s experiences!

What is Black Hat?

“Black Hat is one of the most well known information security conferences in the world. Black Hat, held in Las Vegas, is part of “InfoSec Week,” along with Def-Con and B-Sides. At Black Hat, I learned about some of the latest and greatest hacks and breakthroughs in the field of InfoSec. I heard from some of the greatest and most experienced in security and the InfoSec industry at large, like Richard Bejtlich, the author of The Practice of Network Security.

“For all those who attended using the Student Scholarship, a breakfast was held the first day to introduce the newcomers to the spirit of BlackHat (and get them fed!). A few presenters gave informal background stories on their lives in InfoSec and what the industry is looks like in their eyes; this was some of the most important insight I gained. They advised us as newcomers to plan to attend 3-4 talks. The rest of the time, they said, go create a community and learn how to make it better. I took that message to heart.”

Some Highlights from Black Hat

Innovation City

Innovation City showcased a number of startup security efforts. Some touched upon new ways of Information Sharing, which is an effort to decrease the effectiveness of newly discovered bugs by spreading knowledge of their existence to partners in the program. In general, the ideas presented were turnkey solutions, which needed some time to develop before they could become scalable solutions for an enterprise.

Arsenal

One of the most valuable assets to a security minded person is their ability to understand hands-on labs and attacks. The Arsenal included sessions on multiple attacks and creative new venues that teach exploit-ready software and plugins for popular tools. Almost all of these tools have free versions, or can be found open source.

PWNIE Awards (Pronounced:[Pone-e])

The Hacker community has a fascination with sophistication when it comes to exploitation. So in order to officially recognize this at the conference and give credit where credit is due to those who best ‘PWN’ in categories such as Priv-Escalation, Server-Side/Client-Side Bugs, most innovative research , and lastly infamy for the worst (or best mishandling) vendor response to an incident.

The Facility

Mandalay Bay Conference Center is an outstanding facility. The scale of this is easily the size of Madison square garden. It was definitely possible to get lost, but once you find the quadrant that contains the core BlackHat Venue, it was easy enough to get around. Many of the social activities that accompany the Con, however, were spread out in the facility and could be hard to find.

Mandalay Bay Conference Center has a rooftop venue called the ‘Foundation Room’, which overlooked the entire strip that contains the most concentrated area of the city.

How I Attended the Conference

Black Hat offers scholarships for students to attend the conference.

Requirements: In order to apply for one of these scholarships, students must meet the following criteria:

Must be at least 18 years old at the time of the event
Must provide copy of verifiable proof of full-time academic status at an accredited college or university.
Must provide copy of valid and current college/university ID card

Anthony’s advice for those thinking about applying? “Apply, do it!”

Spotlight On: MS in Enterprise Analytics

The MS in Enterprise Analytics is the newest degree offered by the Seidenberg School, having kicked off for the Fall ’15 semester. The program is set to train students in data analysis for making business decisions. Students will combine mathematical and systematic reasoning to apply data analysis to business operation.

The skills learned through the program are exceptionally useful in today’s business world, where many decisions are made every day that can profoundly impact the business and its environment in good or bad ways. Utilizing analytics is a useful way to predict the outcomes of different decisions, meaning the data can be used to support or discourage various courses of action. When the stakes are high, data analysts are the ones who have the knowledge to provide reliable recommendations.

Students taking the MS in Enterprise Analytics will gain a particular mastery in the analysis of non-traditional data sets. These could include big, real-time, audio-video, unstructured, and natural-language based data. These types of data, so critical for businesses to understand, typically cannot be analyzed by common personal-computer based programs like Excel, Minitab, and SPSS. Enterprise Analytics will give you the skills necessary to analyze the more complex data that defines our world today.

Some of the classes in the 2 year, 30-credit program:

Data and text mining
Big data warehousing
Enterprise intelligence
Real-time image processing of security video
Application of Big data analytics in supply chain optimization
Application of Big data analytics in enterprise process optimization.

For more information about this exciting new opportunity at Seidenberg, contact us!