(techy music)
>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington,
it's the Cube, covering AWS Imagine.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services.
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with the Cube.
We're downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine EDU Event.
It's a small conference.
It's a second year, but it'll grow like a weed
like everything else does.
AWS and it's all about Amazon and AWS for education.
And that's everything from K-12, Community College,
higher education, retraining vets coming out of the service.
It's a really big area.
And we're really excited to have fresh off
his keynote presentations where he changed his title on me
from what it was this morning, to what it was this afternoon
it's David Raymond, the director
of what was the Virginia Cyber Range
and now is the US Cyber Range of Virginia Tech.
David, great to see you.
>> Yeah, thank you, thanks.
So the Virginia Cyber Range actually
will continue to exist in its current form.
>> Jeff: Okay.
>> Well it will still serve faculty
and students in the Commonwealth of Virginia,
funded by the state of Virginia.
Now, the US Cyber Range Fund will provide service
to folks outside of Virginia.
>> Jeff: So we jumped ahead.
So let's back up a step.
>> Sure.
>> What is the Virginia Cyber Range?
>> So the Virginia Cyber Range provides courseware
and infrastructure so students can do hands-on
cybersecurity educational activities,
in Virginia high schools and colleges.
So funded by the state of Virginia
and provides this service at no charge to the schools.
>> Jeff: And even in high school?
>> Even in high school, yes.
So now that there are now cybersecurity courses
in the Virginia Department of Education course catalog
as of two years ago
and I mean, they've grown like wildfire.
>> Jeff: A ton of talk here about skills gap,
and there's tremendous skills gap,
even though machines are going to take everybody's job.
(David laughs)
There's a whole lot of jobs that aren't filled out there.
But what's interesting, I mean,
the high school angle is really weird.
I mean, how do you,
most high school kids haven't even kind of clued into
privacy and security and opting in and opting out,
it's got to be a really interesting conversation
when now you bring security into that
a potential career into that,
and directly reflects on all those things
that you do on your phone.
>> David: Well, I would argue that
that's exactly the problem.
Students are not exposed to cybersecurity.
They don't know what the career potentials are,
they really don't understand what it is.
We talked about teenagers being digital natives,
really, they know how to use smartphones,
they know how to use computers,
but they don't understand how they work.
And they don't understand the security aspects
that go along with using all this technology.
And I would argue that
by the time a student gets into college,
they have a plan, right?
So I have a student in college,
he's going to be a doctor, he knows what a doctor is.
He's heard of that his whole life.
And in high school,
he's able to get certified as a nursing assistant.
We need cybersecurity in that same realm, right?
If we start students in high school
and we expose them to cybersecurity Courses,
they're all elective courses,
some of the students will latch on to it,
and they'll say, hey,
this is what I want to be when I grow up.
And in Virginia,
we have this dearth of cybersecurity expertise.
And this is true across the country.
In Virginia right now,
we have over 30,000 cybersecurity jobs that are unfilled,
that's about a third
of the cybersecurity jobs in the state.
And I mean, that's a serious problem,
not only in Virginia, but nationwide.
And one of the ways to fix that
is to get high school students
exposed to cybersecurity classes.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> Give them some real hands-on opportunities.
So they're really doing it, not just learning the words
and you know, passing the test.
And I mean, really, again, in Virginia,
this is grown like wildfire,
and we really think it's revolutionized
Cybersecurity Education in the state.
>> And what are some of the topics that say,
a high school level where you know,
you're kind of getting a vast on the vocabulary
and the terminology versus when they go into college
and start to take those types of courses?
>> Yeah, so in Virginia,
there's actually Cybersecurity Courses
across the CTE career pathways.
And so CTE is the Career and Technical Education Curricula.
And so there are courses like Cybersecurity in Health Care
where students learn about personal health data
and how to secure those specific kinds of data,
they learn about the regulations behind that data.
There's Health Care in Manufacturing,
where students learn about industrial control systems
and when you know how those things need to be secured
and how they're different from a laptop
or a phone and the way those are secured.
And what feeds into all of those courses is
an introductory course Cybersecurity Fundamentals
where students learn some of the very basics
they learn the terminology,
they learn things like the CIA triad, right?
Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability
are the three basic components of security
that you try to maintain for any system.
So they start out learning the basics.
But still, they're doing that hands-on
so they're in a network environment
where they see that you know,
later on in the course during Capstone exercises,
they might see someone trying to attack a computer
that they're tasked to defend.
And as a defender, what does that look like?
What are the things that I'm going to do to that computer,
I might install antivirus,
I might have a firewall on the computer
and how do I set that up and ec cetera, ec cetera.
So, high school start with the basics,
as students progress through their high school years,
there are opportunities to take further,
more advanced classes in the high schools.
And then when they get to college,
some of those students are going to have latched on
to cybersecurity as a potential career field.
And now we've got them, right?
>> Jeff: Right, right.
>> We get them into the right majors
and into the right courses.
And our hope is that that's going to sort of kickstart
this pipeline of students in Virginia colleges.
>> Right.
And then I wonder if you could talk a little bit about
the support at the state level.
And it's pretty interesting
that you had it from the state level.
We heard earlier today about support at the state level
and I think it was Louisiana for another big initiative.
So you know, that the fact that the governor
and the legislature are basically branding
this at the state level,
not the individual school district level
is a pretty strong statement of the prioritization
that they're putting on this thing.
>> David: That's been critical to our success.
If we didn't have state level support,
significant state level support,
there's no way we could be where we are.
So, the previous Governor of Virginia,
Terry McAuliffe, he latched on to Cybersecurity Education
as one of his signature initiatives.
In fact, he was the President of the
State Governors Association.
And in that role,
cybersecurity was one of his key initiatives.
So he felt strongly about educating k-12,
educating college students,
feeding that cybersecurity pipeline.
And the Cyber Range is
one of the handful of different initiatives.
So they were veteran scholarships
and there were some community college scholarships
and other other initiatives.
Some of those are still ongoing,
some of them are not,
but the Cyber Range has been very successful,
funded by the state, provides a service at no cost
to high schools and colleges and that's been critical.
>> Jeff: Right.
I can't help we're at RSA earlier this year,
and I'm just thinking of all the CEOs
that I was sitting with, over the course of
a couple of days that are probably
looking for your phone number right now,
without making introduction.
But I'm curious, are the companies, the security companies,
I mean, RSA is a huge show, Amazon just had their first ever
security conference, and it is a lot of money
being invested in this space.
Are they behind it?
Have you have you looked for any kind of
private company participation to help
because they desperately need these employees?
>> Yeah, definitely.
So we've just started down that road really,
I mean, our state funding has kept us strong to this point.
And our state funding is going to continue
into the foreseeable future.
But you're right, there are definitely opportunities
to work with industry.
Certainly, AWS has been a very strong partner
of ours since the very beginning.
They really I mean, without the help of
some of their cloud architects and other technical folks,
we could not have built what we built in the AWS cloud.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> We've also been talking to Palo Alto
about using some of their virtual appliances
in our network environments.
So yeah, so we're definitely going down the road
of industry partners.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> And that that will continue to grow, I'm sure.
>> Jeff: So then fast forward today, to the keynote.
And your announcement
that now you've taken it beyond just Virginia.
So now it's the US Cyber Range.
How did that come about?
What does that mean?
>> Yeah, so we've been sharing the story
of the Virginia Cyber Range for the last couple of years.
And I go to national conferences and talk about it,
just to sort of inform other states,
other school systems, what Virginia is doing,
how could you potentially match what we're doing.
The question that I keep getting is,
I don't want to reinvent the wheel,
how can I buy what you have?
And that's been a sort of
a constant drumbeat over the last couple years.
So we decided fairly early on
that we might want to try to expand beyond Virginia.
And it just sort of the conditions were right,
about six months ago,
so we set a mark on the wall, we said in summer of 2019,
we're going to make this available
to folks outside of Virginia.
And so again, the Virginia Cyber Range still exists
funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The US Cyber Range is still part of Virginia Tech.
So we're within Virginia Tech.
But we will have to,
we will have to essentially recoup our costs.
So we'll have to spend money on cloud infrastructure,
and we'll have to spend salary money
on folks who support this effort.
And so we recoup costs from folks
that are outside of Virginia using our service,
but we think the cost is going to be very competitive
compared to similar efforts.
And we're looking forward to some successes here.
>> And do you think your kind of breakthrough will be
at the high school level,
the undergrad level,
where do you kind of see the opportunity?
Because you've got the whole thing covered
with state support in Virginia.
>> Yeah.
>> How does that get started in California?
How does that get started here at Washington State?
>> That's a great question.
So we really, when we started this,
I thought we were building a thing for higher ed.
That's my experience.
I've been teaching cybersecurity in higher ed
for several years.
And I knew what I would want if I was using it,
and I do use it.
So I teach classes at Virginia Tech,
in the graduate ECE program.
And so I use the Virginia Cyber Range in my class.
What has happened is that
the high schools have latched on to this, as I mentioned,
and most of our users are high schools in Virginia,
we have 180, Virginia high schools
using the Virginia Cyber Range.
>> 180 high schools?
>> 180, that's almost half the high schools in the state,
using the Virginia Cyber Range.
So we think and if you think about,
higher ed has been teaching cybersecurity classes,
the faculty members who've been teaching them,
a lot of them have set up their own network infrastructure,
they haven't set up the way they want it.
And it ties into their existing courseware
and they're going to use that, at least for now.
What we provide is something that makes it so that
a high school or a community college doesn't have to
figure out how to fund
or figure out how to actually put this
network architecture together.
They just come to us, they have the flexibility to use
just our very basic plug and play network environments,
or they have flexibility to make modifications,
depending on how sophisticated they themselves are
with manipulating systems and manipulating the network.
So our expectation is that the biggest growth
is going to be in the high school market.
>> Jeff: Right, that's great.
Because when you say Cyber Range, that finally dawned on me,
you said it was like a target range.
It's like a place to go practice.
>> That's where the name comes from, right, absolutely.
>> If I finally like, Oh, Okay, I get it.
So because it's not only the curriculum
and the courseware and everything else,
but it's actually an environment
and hands-on the stage things
and do things and practice things.
>> So students can do offensive
offensive and defensive cybersecurity activities.
And so early on, when we were teaching students
how to hack essentially, in colleges,
there were people who are concerned about that
and the military case we make for that
is you can't teach somebody how to defend
unless they understand how they're going to be attacked.
>> Jeff: Right.
>> And the same is true in this case.
So all of our courseware has lots of ethics
and other legal and other discussions
embedded throughout so students understand the implications
of what their actions would be,
if they do it somewhere else.
And the right, these are all isolated network environments,
there are places where students can get hands-on
in a place where they can essentially do whatever they want
without causing trouble on the school network
or on the internet.
And it's very much akin to a rifle range.
>> Jeff: Right, and like you said,
you can have different scenarios,
and I would imagine, there's probably going to be
competitions, if you think back to what's going on
in the robotics world.
>> We score lots of competition.
>> All these things, right.
It's like white hat, black hat hackers.
Well, very, very exciting, David.
Congratulations. >> Thank you
>> Sounds like you're well on your way.
>> Thanks, great.
>> All right this is David and I'm Jeff.
You're watching the Cube.
We're at Washington State Convention Center,
just across the street at AWS Imagine.
Thanks for watching.
We'll see you next time.
>> Thanks.
(techy music)