MORGANTOWN – On May 7, 2021, the Columbia Pipeline was temporarily shut down due to a ransomware attack.
This attack and the widespread vulnerability of our computer systems were on the minds of a panel of panelists Wednesday at the seventh annual Focus Forward Symposium, hosted through the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation.
The panel titled Our Greatest Threat: Cybersecurity at Work and School.
The U. S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (IASC) has called on the U. S. The U. S. Department of Defense explains: “Ransomware is an ever-evolving form of malware designed to encrypt files on a device, rendering all files and the systems that rely on them useless. The malicious actors then demand a ransom in exchange for the decryption.
Karen Evans, executive leader of the Cyber Readiness Institute, said small and medium-sized businesses are the most vulnerable part of the country and are prone to ransomware. And the attackers don’t even want to spread the ransomware themselves — it’s such a lucrative market that I can just buy it.
And small businesses don’t have the resources to rent IT to protect themselves, he said.
Josh Brunty, a trainer on the cybersecurity team at Marshall University, said cybersecurity experts are in short supply. There is a need to set up cyber academies in schools, to excite students from an early age and get them to work with small and medium-sized enterprises.
It may not be cheap,” he says. This will require very wide acceptance. . . But the return on investment will be phenomenal.
Gen. James Hoyer, WVU’s vice president of economic innovation and a former adjutant general of the National Guard, said the generation exacerbates two problems: divisions and complacency. This makes us vulnerable to other, more dynamic countries. That’s why we want to teach academics civil discourse and how to picture together. If we don’t, “we’ll get our butts kicked. “
Evans said other people are also in a hurry to accept the generation without thinking about it. They don’t check this email, purportedly from their boss or a family member, asking them to pay $200,000 or buy 50 Amazon gift cards.
Hoyer agreed. ” We want to teach fundamental skills that we want to pay attention to. “
Hoyer noted that in 2023, the Department of Defense Information Network at Joint Force Headquarters and U. S. Cyber Command will be able to launch the Joint Task Force. UU. se partnered with Marshall University and WVU to create a national center of excellence for cybersecurity in infrastructure in West Virginia.
That makes Marshall and WVU, he said, national assets and opens the door to “making West Virginia the place in the universe for national security. “
Email: dbeard@dominionpost. com
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