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Colorado has had a shortage of cybersecurity professionals for years. Here’s how that’s going.

Colorado schools like MSU Denver have ramped up cybersecurity programs as the world’s thirst for cyber protection grows. But it’s not just about a college degree.

June 9, 2022
By Tamara Chuang

The pressure was on. Someone, somewhere, was attacking computer systems so customers couldn’t reach certain websites. In a windowless room in Denver, Zack Privette had worked all morning with his security team to figure out what the cyber strangers were up to.

“What’s happened is that we have an attacker who has been going through our different websites and they found a vulnerability into our active directory and …,” Privette explained to Richard Mac Namee, identified as chief operating officer of the company under attack.

“OK, I’m not technical. What does that mean?” interrupted Mac Namee, who is really the director of the new Cybersecurity Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver. And he’s actually quite technical.

This was a simulation.

The makeshift “Cyber Range” command center inside MSU Denver’s Cybersecurity Center had multiple TV screens showing ominous maps of live cyber threats. It’s part of a unique training ground for students, recent grads and people who don’t even attend the college but are interested in cybersecurity careers.

Privette, who isn’t an MSU student, got to experience the Cyber Range program because it’s open to outsiders. The industry needs more outsiders. According to one estimate, there are 66 cybersecurity professionals for every 100 job openings nationwide. It’s tighter in Colorado, where there are 59 for every 100. And demand is growing faster than training programs like MSU can graduate.

Mac Namee is behind the school’s Cybersecurity Center and getting the school designated as a National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense in March. A former commander in the United Kingdom’s Special Forces who’s worked as a specialist in counterterrorism, Mac Namee keeps it practical. During the simulation, he pretends to be an ordinary company executive. Students must figure out how to explain the cyber mayhem to non-techies — and fast!

The makeshift “Cyber Range” command center inside MSU Denver’s Cybersecurity Center had multiple TV screens showing ominous maps of live cyber threats. It’s part of a unique training ground for students, recent grads and people who don’t even attend the college but are interested in cybersecurity careers.

Privette, who isn’t an MSU student, got to experience the Cyber Range program because it’s open to outsiders. The industry needs more outsiders. According to one estimate, there are 66 cybersecurity professionals for every 100 job openings nationwide. It’s tighter in Colorado, where there are 59 for every 100. And demand is growing faster than training programs like MSU can graduate.

Mac Namee is behind the school’s Cybersecurity Center and getting the school designated as a National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense in March. A former commander in the United Kingdom’s Special Forces who’s worked as a specialist in counterterrorism, Mac Namee keeps it practical. During the simulation, he pretends to be an ordinary company executive. Students must figure out how to explain the cyber mayhem to non-techies — and fast!

“So, 14 minutes of outage,” Mac Namee said. “Fourteen minutes with our athletes and the way they’re trying to log on, that’s quite a big problem. How will we resolve this?”

Privette went on to explain that there was a backup so the data is safe. But he acknowledged the attackers were still inside the system and his team was now trying to figure out if data had been stolen. His team thinks credentials were taken, but he doesn’t think the theft involved customers’ personally identifiable data, he said. Mac Namee gave him an hour to figure it out.

 

How it’s going

Targeted training programs have been popping up nationwide for the past decade as nearly every business with a website, ecommerce offering or other internet-based operation must deal with data breaches, ransomware and other cyber threats.

According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, which tracks breaches and supports victims, the number of publicly reported data breaches in the U.S. more than doubled since 2015 to 1,862 last year. Regulations in Colorado and around the globe also put the onus on companies to protect customers’ personal data.

Back in 1999, partly to address the lack of qualified professionals, the U.S. National Security Agency launched its National Centers of Academic Excellence program. It certifies schools with a cybersecurity curriculum for cyber research, defense education and cyber operations. There are now about 380 colleges and universities in the U.S. Such designations require standardized cybersecurity curriculum, active challenges and professional development. There are 13 schools in Colorado and include state, community and private colleges.

The partnership with industry and MSU Denver is credited to Mac Namee, said Steve Beaty, a professor in the school’s computer science department. While Beaty started teaching cybersecurity courses in 2004, a cybersecurity degree debuted just four years ago. The new center and partnerships with private cybersecurity companies such as Atos, a European information technology firm that is now taking up space in the facility, really took off after Mac Namee arrived.

“He had the bandwidth. Some of us haven’t had the bandwidth to do a lot of this stuff. Atos is due to him,” Beaty said. “Richard is the one who put the fire under what’s going on here.”

And looking at the heat map of cybersecurity job openings at CyberSeek.org, the U.S. needs it.