Eight Clark State students and four faculty members spent their summer immersed in learning how to keep future employers safe as part of the Clark State Community College Summer 2014 Cyber Security Internship and Externship Program.

The program was funded by a National Science Foundation grant and was supplemented by resources from OhioMeansJobs.

“This summer was a challenging learning experience for everyone involved…and everyone stepped up to that challenge,” said Dan Heighton, Clark State professor and principal investigator for the program. “All of us were thrown out of our comfort zones as we learned new things about the cyber security realm. Each of the projects was highly successful, the local companies received valuable products and both our students and faculty developed new skills and knowledge.”

Students J. Sam Coons, Fenton Harrison and Audrey McDaniel joined Ronda Black, IT faculty and Jerome Murray, math faculty, to create a hacker profile for AT&T. The system that was developed is a mathematical-based scoring system to identify threat levels of hackers.

Students Keith Carrier, Shaun Foor, Alex Fryman and William Johnson joined IT faculty members Danis Heighton and Greg Teets to work at Riverside Research. This group created a cyber security test bed environment and provided recommendations for further steps the organization can take to protect itself and its intellectual property.

Troy Raines, a Clark State student, worked at LexisNexis in a user account maintenance and update project. He helped identify user profile categories, assign permissions and update current permissions and accounts.

All of the participants worked during the day and attended classes at Clark State’s Beavercreek campus in the evening to learn the theory behind the practical applications they were working with.

“The goal of this program was to expose our students to the growing field of cyber security and challenge them with practical projects that have been identified by professionals in the community,” said Dale Rude, Clark State adjunct and internship coordinator. “A secondary goal is to establish externships for our faculty to enhance their knowledge by exposing them to real-world challenges that companies are facing. This learning will be brought back into the classroom to advance the program and make our students even more marketable.”

Clark State adjunct Cathy Balas worked with the students, serving as the co-principal investigator for the internship program.