Universities against cyberthreats

Opinion
Jan 14, 20111 min

Iowa State, USC putting their researchers and students up against growing malware and IT security threats

The Iowa State Daily is reporting that Iowa State University students are cooking up cyber attacks on a SCADA test bed that will help them learn how to defend against such threats.

Defending SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) networks — those used for industrial control systems — has beena hot topic since the Stuxnet worm struck SCADA networks, in particular those in Iran.

Their work is being funded in part by the NSF.

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On a related note, the University of Southern California is the recipient of a new 5-year, $16 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security to expand its DETERlab, a 400-node “mini-Internet” used by researchers to examine the impact of malware on computer networking and applications without messing with the real Internet. The funding will support a new project dubbed DETECT that will in part expand the reach of DETERlab to more researchers around the world.

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