Welcome, my name is Emiliana Merida, and I was an intern at the NICE Program Office this past year. I am currently a Senior at Cal State San Bernardino (CSUSB), a National Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cybersecurity institution, where I am the Outreach Officer of the CSUSB student chapter of Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) club. In this role, I received the scholarship to be part of the WICYS 2022 conference where I made connections resulting in a job offer from a company to start in the summer of 2022. 

During my internship at NICE, I gathered data to create visualizations of audience attention and engagement during NICE webinars. Research was conducted concerning cybersecurity pathways and defining employability skills and how they might fit within the NICE framework.

This quarter’s newsletter features topics on student perspectives within cybersecurity careers, how communities practice IT and cybersecurity, and so much more. Cybersecurity has become a trending topic within schools, workplace, and communities where curiosity is sparking. Hopefully, everyone can enjoy these informative articles.

Emiliana Merida
NICE Intern

Creating Communities of Practice in the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity

Learning is fundamentally a social process and many groups have newcomers, old-timers, artifacts, knowledge, and practices. Creating a space, whether physical or virtual, in which participants can collaborate may evolve naturally or be created deliberately with the intention of advancing collective knowledge. Peer-to-peer learning is not new and has proven to facilitate trust development, cohesion, and deeper understanding among individuals who share experiences to improve practices. 

Maril Vernon

This issue’s interview is with Maril Vernon, Offensive Security Engineer at Zoom. Ms. Vernon discusses the variety of cybersecurity roles that exist, shares the importance and value of engaging with the cybersecurity community, and shares the joy she feels working in this field, among other topics.

Name: Maril Vernon

Organization: Zoom

NICE Framework Categories: Protect & Defend; Analyze; Collect & Operate 

NICE Framework Work Roles: Cyber Operator; Cyber Ops Planner; Exploitation Analyst; Security Control Assessor; System Testing and Evaluation Specialist; Vulnerability Assessment Analyst

Academic Degree: A.A., French Language, Grossmont College; B.A., Russian and Soviet Studies, University of California, San Diego; M.S., Cyber Security and Information Assurance, Western Governors University

Students’ Perspectives on Careers in Cybersecurity

By Felicia Rateliff, iKeepSafe

The increasing expansion of technology and the lack of qualified people to meet its demands has led to a great need for more cybersecurity workers. Many believe that increasing the cybersecurity workforce needs to begin with K-12 students.  But how?  To learn more, we went directly to the source. We asked middle and high school students and recent graduates for their perspectives on what they knew about cybersecurity careers.

Developing Cybersecurity Experts for the Fifth Domain

By Tish Rourke, Lockheed Martin’s Rotary and Mission Systems

As our nation and the world continue to face persistent and increasingly sophisticated, malicious cyber-attacks and campaigns, capabilities like Lockheed Martin’s full-spectrum cyber programs and cyber-resiliency become more important each day. Lockheed Martin, part of the Defense Industrial Base, is a global security and aerospace company that supports the “fifth domain” or cyberspace – the latest theater of warfare – alongside sea, land, air, and space.

Creating a Community of Practice for Workforce Development in Industrial Cybersecurity

by Ralph Ley, Department Manager, Workforce Development and Training, Idaho National Laboratory

A recent report by Purdue University found there is only one degree program in the United States dedicated to producing industrial cybersecurity professionals -- those would be the individuals tasked to securely design, build, operate, and maintain the critical cyber-physical infrastructures that provide reliable electricity, clean drinking water, and affordable manufactured goods ranging from toilet paper to Tesla.