cybersecurity

In December 2022, Abi Whittle was holding down two jobs and taking a full load of classes in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. Then she read about a scholarship, being offered for the first time at the college, intended specifically for students like her: computer science majors following the cybersecurity track. She applied and was selected from nearly 35 applicants as one of five students to join the university’s first cohort of Scholarship for Service recipients.

Sanghyun Hong, assistant professor of computer science at Oregon State University, has been selected as one of six cybersecurity researchers in the U.S. to participate in the 2023 Google Research Scholar Program.

Students involved in the Oregon State University Security Club have won or placed near the top in several computer security competitions over the past year, most recently qualifying for DEF CON 30 CTF. Oregon State’s team ranked 15th out of 469 teams around the globe in preliminaries for the capture the flag-style information security competition.

As cyber and ransomware attacks become more prolific, demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to grow, but there is a dire shortage of people with the required skills. There are about 4,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in Oregon alone, and more than 460,000 nationwide, according to Cyberseek.

For the third consecutive year, a team of Oregon State University computer science students placed first regionally in the Cyberforce Competition hosted by the Department of Energy on November 15-16, 2019. They competed against 17 teams at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. The team placed sixth in the nationwide competition, which included over 100 teams.