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Kevin Streff and Mark Moran Presenting at National Conference

Dakota State University professors Kevin Streff and Mark Moran were featured presenters at Course Technology’s 2004 National Conference held in San Antonio, Texas. The conference brought together over 700 Information Technology educators for three days to examine technology important to education.

Streff and Moran spoke on two topics relevant to the emerging field of information assurance and computer security. In their first presentation they outlined DSU’s experiences in the effort to become a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance through the National Security Agency.

Their second presentation was entitled ‘Setting Up an Attack & Defend Lab’. As part of the process of developing an Information Assurance program at Dakota State, the university has established a state-of-the-art hacker lab where students are taught the tricks of the trade in the hacker community. This is done so those students can defend against these types of attacks when working in organizations and agencies around the globe. Moran described the lab created at DSU, including the grant program that helped fund a portion of the lab, the network architecture of the lab, and components included in the lab. Streff, who teaches intrusion detection classes in the lab, shared insights into how faculty members can use attack and defend labs to educate students who plan to pursue a career in the information assurance field.