RBR Tech Students Learn about Cyber Security Careers at AT&T

On May 29, twenty two Red Bank Regional students joined students from Freehold, Manalapan and Holmdel for a first ever AT&T Cybersecurity Experience (ACE) at the Middletown location. After a tour of the sprawling facility, they arrived at the Cybersecurity Innovation Center to learn how AT&T actively protects its networks and customers from malicious actors every day. There they were greeted by AT&T Vice President of Security Architecture Rita Marty who encouraged them to seek cybersecurity careers after college at AT&T, a company in their own backyard.

She explained that the four schools were invited for this special outing since they either had courses of study in cybersecurity (RBR) or clubs. She commended RBR for their CyberPatriot teams performance as they finished first and third in the state in the CyberPatriot Competition this year.

Ms. Marty explained that AT&T hosts 200 Petabytes of data in their network, which one RBR student described as “1015 bytes.” AT&T has 143 million users on its networks, with hundreds of employees devoted to protecting its networks and customers.

The purpose of the event was apparent as Ms. Marty explained that challenges to keeping hackers and data saboteurs at bay are daunting given “the gap of cyber security talent,” adding, “we just do not have enough people to fill the need. And over the next four years, we (the United States) expect we’ll need an extra 3.5 million people in this field.”

She exclaimed, “You are the future of cyber security. And one thing that I want you to take away when you go back to school is that this is a great place to be and consider making AT&T and cybersecurity your career.”

The students then broke up into smaller groups rotating around different demo stations. One demo using a large TV screen with a map of the world, demonstrated malicious traffic traversing the network.

An AT&T employee explained, “It is still up to the customers to update their software. A lot of companies say their infrastructure is critical to operations, so they cannot afford to be offline. But we need to pivot: this is crucial infrastructure that needs to be protected.”

RBR student CJ Bevacqua compared using any protected internet programs such as email or banking in an open Wi-Fi network akin to “bathing in a public bath.”

With some historic background discussion on the famous Turing Machine created by Alan Turning, which broke the Nazi “Enigma” encryption and ultimately shortened World War II, students took their hand at breaking codes. Yet another demo utilized virtual headsets and tasked the students to complete a special mission. They had to safely deliver star quarterback (Murray the Mascot) to the football stadium on time while being pursued by malicious actors who attempted to take virtual control of their car. The students who finished their mission only did so by successfully employing AT&T’s security platform instructions.

RBR senior Chloe Sharpe opined on the day, stating, “I really liked the Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Exhibit. Secondly, they simulated a DDOS attack on a demo server. One demonstrator was the attacker and showed us how he could create botnets using internet-connected device nodes. These botnets could take over the traffic from devices that still had the default password setting enabled to control household appliances like your Alexa or baby monitors. All those devices then would be in a zombie network attacking the specified demo server, which would crash. That was really scary.”

Chloe will be attending the Stevens Institute next year and studying computer engineering. She and her fellow visiting students were encouraged to apply for any number of AT&T internships offered to students studying computer science in college. AT&T also mentioned that local high schools will be welcome to participate in a Hackathon they plan to host next fall.

RBR Cyber Technology teacher Mandy Galante stated of the AT&T event, “As they toured the AT&T cybersecurity demos, our AOIT students were proud that their years of cyber studies made it possible to converse easily with the professionals about security technologies. But then the student's eyes were opened to the future when the engineers gave them a test run of the Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality cybersecurity systems. I was thrilled that they got the chance to picture what it is like to work in this type of groundbreaking environment.”