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This event has already occurred. The video has been posted to YouTube.

The Cybersecurity and Networking Division (CSND) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is hosting virtual office hours for Illinois K-12 teachers next Wednesday, April 22nd from 3pm - 5pm Central time.

The session will cover various cybersecurity topics, from protecting yourself from spearfishing, scams, and malware; to password hygiene, especially while working remotely during the pandemic. Office hours will begin with a slideshow presentation from NCSA security staff, followed by a question and answer session over chat.

If you are not able to join the presentation at 3pm, you are welcome to hop in later to ask questions, or view the recording afterwards. 

PDF copy of the slides

Presentations are recorded and include time for questions with the audience.

For questions about the presentation, or security in general, contact help+security@ncsa.illinois.edu.

To learn more about security at NCSA, see our websiteour Github, and follow us on Twitter at @NCSASecurity.

On Wednesday, members of the NCSA security team gave a group presentation on different topics impacting NCSA staff and assets. The talk began with Security Engineer Paul Guder reviewing helpful tips for generating and managing passwords. Next, Lead Security Engineer Chris Clausen shared the various tools they use to conduct vulnerability scanning. Then, Sr. Security Engineer Kay Avila reviewed DUO, the two-factor authenticator used for protecting NCSA assets. And, Sr. Security Engineer Leandro Avila-Diaz gave a refresher on email phishing scams that commonly occur in a work environment. Paul ended the presentation by directing people to the Security Operations Wiki, highlighting resources the security team have put together to help support and educate staff. 

PDF copy of the slides: NCSA IRST Lightning Talks Lunch (1).pdf

This talk was the first of a quarterly series in 2020. Contact Jeannette Dopheide for suggestions on future topics.

For questions about the presentation, or security in general, contact help+security@ncsa.illinois.edu

To learn more about security at NCSA, see our websiteour Github, and follow us on Twitter at @NCSASecurity.


NCSA's cybersecurity group has an opening for a cybersecurity policy specialist. Join our team to work on cutting edge software and projects that help secure cyberinfrastructure for national and international science and engineering research communities. To view the full post and apply, click the corresponding link below. 

https://jobs.illinois.edu/academic-job-board/job-details?jobID=120478

NCSA's cybersecurity group is hiring research scientists. Join our team to work on cutting edge software and projects that help secure cyberinfrastructure for national and international science and engineering research communities. To view full post and apply, click the corresponding link below. 

Research Scientist - National Center for Supercomputing Applications (111608)

CSND at #TechEX19

NCSA's Cybersecurity and Networking Division (CSND) will be participating in the 2019 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX19) meeting. Corey Eichelberger will be presenting on Approaches To High Resolution Network Telemetry & Analytics With Machine Learning on Tuesday, December 10 at 09:20am. Kapil Agrawal will be presenting a short tutorial on "RESTful ain't Stressful" discussing RESTful interfaces and API's from a network operator's point of view on Monday, December 9th at 3:30PM and a presentation on Automated Provisioning & Orchestration for Vendor-Agnostic Networks on Thursday, December 12 at 3:10pm. And, Jim Basney will be representing NCSA's CILogon project in the Federated Identity Management for Research (FIM4R), Research and Education FEDerations (REFEDS), and The Americas Policy Management Authority (TAGPMA) sessions. We hope to see you there!

Lead Security Engineer Chris Clausen gave the November security talk to NCSA staff today. The presentation focused on security tips for travelers, especially those who travel with work devices, or need access NCSA/campus resources while traveling. A PDF copy of the slides is available here.

CSND is working on a page for NCSA staff to share and update this information; it is currently under construction. 

This talk was the our last presentation for 2019. We will resume the quarterly security talks in the spring. Please contact Jeannette Dopheide if you have a suggestion for a future topic.

If you have questions about the presentation or security in general, please contact us at help+security@ncsa.illinois.edu

To learn more about security at NCSA, see our website. To learn more about software development at NCSA, see our Github. And follow us on Twitter at @NCSASecurity.

Illinois graduate student Yuming Wu recently attended the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC ’19) and was awarded 3rd place at Cisco's IoT Hackathon. Yuming's award included speaking time to briefly present a summary of her research to the GHC audience and an offer to intern with Cisco's IoT team in 2020. Youming is a Computer Engineering student. Her research is supported through a partnership between NCSA and the Coordinated Science Laboratory's (CSL) Depend Lab. It includes auditing and mitigation of SSH brute-force attacks, and applying machine learning to detect intrusions, such as APTs.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $12.5m renewal grant to Trusted CI, the Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE). The renewal award will fund the Center through 2024. “The dynamic, open, and distributed nature of scientific collaboration introduces unique cybersecurity challenges for scientific cyberinfrastructure,” said NCSA’s Jim Basney, who serves as deputy director of Trusted CI. “With our focus on cybersecurity for NSF science, Trusted CI provides leadership and guidance that addresses these unique challenges.”

More details about Trusted CI, and its goals for the next five years, are available in the NCSA press release.

On September 27-29, CSND's Jim Basney and John Zage participated in SFSCon 2019, the third annual cybersecurity training and professional development event at Cal Poly Pomona (CPP) for the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) students and alumni nationwide. 105 student attendees traveled to California from 42 universities across the country for this event. Jim and John provided an Identity and Access Management training, using materials developed by Trusted CI. Jim also served on a cybersecurity career panel to discuss job opportunities (see NCSA Careers for our current openings). NCSA was a sponsor of the event.

Group Photo of SFSCon 2019 Participants

NCSA's CyberSecurity Division is hiring a research scientist. Join our team to work on cutting edge software and projects that help secure cyberinfrastructure for national and international science and engineering research communities. To view full post and apply, click the corresponding link below. 

Research Scientist - National Center for Supercomputing Applications (111608)

NCSA's Cybersecurity and Networking Division (CSND) will be working on a newly announced project called FABRIC. FABRIC is "a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications." In a press release announcing the project, CSND's David Wheeler said, “Through supporting a FABRIC Edge node with our high capacity Wide Area Network to the nationwide infrastructure, this is a great opportunity for the University of Illinois, NCSA, and XSEDE to participate in the advancement of networks and services to further discovery.”

More details about FABRIC, including NCSA's unique role in the project, are available in the NCSA press release.

NCSA's CyberSecurity Division is hiring an assistant security analyst and a security analyst. Join our team to work on cutting edge software and projects that help secure cyberinfrastructure for national and international science and engineering research communities. To view full post and apply, click the corresponding link below. 

Assistant Security Analyst- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (116030)
Close Date: Oct 08, 2019

Security Analyst / Senior Security Analyst- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (115893)
Close Date: Oct 08, 2019

Indiana University's Scott Russel presented the talk, "Learning Security's First Principles with the Super Mario Bros." Scott is a Senior Policy Analyst at the IU's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and is also a member of Trusted CI. The Principles are designed to help security and non-security people communicate and think critically about security. Scott used the Mario Brothers video game series as a relatable and humorous analogy on how to apply the Principles to a security problem.

[Slides] [Video]

If you have a security-related question, please contact us at help+security@ncsa.illinois.edu

To learn more about security at NCSA, see our website. To learn more about software development at NCSA, see our Github. Follow us on Twitter at @NCSASecurity.

Members of NCSA's CSND will be attending PEARC19 and presenting four posters during the poster reception. If you are attending PEARC, the session will be held on Tuesday, July 30th from 6:30 - 8:30pm in the Crystal Foyer and Crystal B rooms. Stop by and see what we've been working on.

  • Corey Eichelberger, Approaches to High Resolution Network Telemetry & Analytics with Machine Learning In Support of High Performance Computing

    • This poster describes ongoing efforts at NCSA to gather high resolution (< 10s collection interval) network telemetry data utilizing SNMP and streaming telemetry with machine learning being utilized to analyze and generate alerts on the data being collected.

  • Kapil Agrawal, Automated network provisioning and orchestration for vendor agnostic networks

    • This poster highlights how network engineers can abstract their network infrastructure as a code using a data modeling strategy and use network automation tools to auto provision devices in a vendor agnostic manner.

  • Alex Withers, Jeff Gaynor, Jim Basney and student collaborator You Alex Gao; SciTokens: Demonstrating Capability-Based Access to Remote Scientific Data using HTCondor
    • SciTokens introduces a capabilities-based authorization infrastructure for distributed scientific computing, to help scientists manage their security credentials more reliably and securely. These access tokens convey the specific authorizations needed by the workflows, rather than general-purpose authentication impersonation credentials, to address the risks of scientific workflows running on distributed infrastructure including NSF resources and public clouds. This poster presents SciTokens project updates since PEARC18.
  • Jim Basney, Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence
    • Trusted CI's mission is to provide the NSF community a coherent understanding of cybersecurity's role in producing trustworthy science and the information and know-how required to achieve and maintain effective cybersecurity programs. Trusted CI addresses the challenge for meeting the needs of individual cyberinfrastructure projects through deep engagements, training, and dissemination of experiences. NCSA is part of the Trusted CI team. To learn more about Trusted CI's involvement at PEARC, see their blog post.

Update: the talk has bee posted to YouTube. The slides have been archived.

Von Welch will be presenting the talk, "Cybersecurity to Enable Science: Hindsight & Vision from the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence," at the NCSA on Thursday, May 30th at 10am Central at the NCSA Auditorium. Von is the director of Trusted CI, which is a collaborative partnership with Indiana University, NCSA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Internet2, and Berkeley Lab. 

Read the full event details here. We are streaming the presentation online if you are not able to attend in person.

Abstract: How can cybersecurity play an enabling role in scientific research? This talk describes the first five years of experience from NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, its vision for the next five, and its take on how cybersecurity supports scientific integrity, reproducibility, and productivity.

Speaker Bio: Von Welch has been enabling scientific research through cybersecurity for over twenty years. He serves as the Director and PI for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (Trusted CI) and for the recently announced NSF-funded Research Security Operations Center (ResearchSOC). At Indiana University he is the Director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) and an Associate Director for the IU Pervasive Technology Institute.

Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events.