PNNL

In a curriculum designed to provide real-world cybersecurity experience, nothing gets more real than detecting an actual threat. Students participating in the Public Infrastructure Security Cyber Education System (PISCES) program at the University of Montana recently discovered and appropriately escalated an anomaly that turned out to be a concern.

“This is what the PISCES program was designed to do: Train students in a controlled environment to detect real-world threats and assist small communities in mitigating them,” said Christian Perry, PISCES task lead at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Through structured university curriculum and community partnerships, PISCES offers no-cost cybersecurity monitoring to small local governments while training the next generation of cybersecurity network analysts—the tenth-fastest-growing job in the country.

The blog post “On The Cyber Front Line In Big Sky Country” by the PISCES team highlights the “delicate dance of investigation and collaboration” that occurs when student analysts identify something suspicious in anonymized data shared from a community partner. In this recent example, students flagged the alert and worked with a PISCES oversight analyst to guide the community partner in responding to the cyber threat, which was lurking in the community’s critical infrastructure.

The University of Montana is one of the newest academic partners to join the PISCES network of more than 20 colleges and universities across the country. What began as a volunteer effort garnered support from PNNL and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to accelerate the growth and impact of the program as it exists today. Since its launch in 2017, PISCES has worked with DHS and PNNL to establish, develop, and grow this nonprofit into a nationwide program. With more than 50 communities sharing data, PISCES provides over 200 students per year with critical cybersecurity-based experience.

While PISCES is now coordinated by the nonprofit organization PISCES International, PNNL cybersecurity staff members like Perry and Ford Powers are continuing to partner with the program to connect university and community partners with PNNL’s cutting-edge cybersecurity research. To learn more about PISCES and how to bring it to a community or university near you, visit https://pisces-intl.org/. You can also learn more about PNNL STEM partnerships and opportunities at https://www.pnnl.gov/stem-education.