CSUS a leader on computer security
Sacramento Bee 5/16/07
The college is now a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. That's a fancy way of saying that the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency consider it ahead of the game in training students to protect computer networks from hackers and criminals.
Only 87 universities in America -- another one of them is UC Davis -- have earned the designation. Sacramento State officials learned of the honor last month.
"It's going to be beneficial for companies in the area," said Dick Smith, a longtime Sacramento State computer science instructor. "We will provide a pathway to employment."
The designation is a big deal because it will help -- through grant money and prestige -- bolster a program trying hard to attract students.
For the past several years, like a lot of colleges, Sacramento State has seen the number of computer science majors drop, largely because of the end of the 1990s dot-com boom, said Du Zhang, chair of the computer science department at Sacramento State.
Now, Sacramento State is competing with many other schools for a limited pool of students.
The college's strategy, Zhang said, is to specialize -- make Sacramento State into a place where students can focus on a particular discipline.
"You can't be all things to all people," Zhang said.
That's where information security comes in. It's a growing field -- nearly every business or government agency is worried about protecting information and computer systems.
So the college started offering courses in things like cryptography -- using coding to protect information -- and computer forensics -- finding evidence of a particular act, often illegal.
"You want to find out what happened and how it happened -- find out who did it and collect evidence," said Isaac Ghansah, director of Sacramento State's relatively new Center for Information Assurance and Security.
Sacramento State got the designation as a reward for its fledgling efforts. It had to meet 10 expansive benchmarks ranging from having state of the art equipment to hosting a center for information security.
The college now offers a minor to criminal justice students who want to specialize in investigating and stopping computer crime. And it has set up a concentration for graduate students interested in computer security.
All of those programs are beginning to attract students, Smith said. "They were really well-received," he said, referring to new courses in computer security. "It was standing-room only."
The school is working on an information security concentration for undergraduate computer science majors, Ghansah said.
The designation -- and the money it should bring -- could also help local community colleges that partner with Sacramento State, Zhang said. The Los Rios Community College District, for example, offers students a concentration that focuses on information security.
"We need to help develop their programs so the students who go through their certificate can continue to develop" at Sacramento State, Zhang said.
The designation will aid state agencies that are hungry for students who know something about protecting networks and tracking hackers, Zhang said. Now, they'll have another school in their backyard producing information security experts.
The bottom line, Zhang said, is that the designation "will help attract students into our program who go on to study information security.
"This will open up a lot of potential opportunities for us."