POLK COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) – Inside the iconic Florida Polytechnic University, visible from I-4, students are getting paid to help protect the university from cyber attacks and develop new solutions for the community.
“We have analyst, architect and engineer,” said Garrett Poorbaugh.
Inside the “SOC,” they need all three.
“You can’t just have somebody that knows how to do cybersecurity on the analyst side or somebody that can solve problems, you also need somebody to connect all the dots. So in that way, all three people are equally important,” said Poorbaugh.
Poorbaugh is principal architect at Sittadel, a Lakeland-based firm that helps small and mid-sized businesses with their cybersecurity needs.
Citadel is partnering with Florida Polytechnic University on their new “Security Operations Center,” which opened last month.
Poorbaugh comes in twice a week to work with paid student interns to “threat hunt” for Florida Poly to monitor for and catch hackers.
“Do you remember how many phishing submissions you saw today?” Poorbaugh asked one of the students. “It was probably hundreds of thousands.”
The students are also doing research and developing new solutions to a global problem.
“What we see too often are silos. People come and they learn about cybersecurity. They come to their degree path. They get out and it’s totally different in the real world,” said Poorbaugh. “We want to create pathways for careers.”
Florida Poly and Sittadel signed a memorandum of understanding Monday for the SOC, which gives students hands-on experience in the field.
Trafenia Salzman, chairman of Sittadel, said the partnership represents a culmination of the dreams and visions she had when she started Sittadel six years ago.
“The students will be able to look at all of the emails or all of the telemetry that is coming in from other businesses and be able to sift through – what’s a threat? What’s not a threat? Really what a security operations center does,” said Salzman.
The university, being a large, STEM-based enterprise, can be a target for cyber attacks.
Cole Allen, vice president for information technology at Florida Polytechnic University, said the university typically has to “triage” the threats due to volume.
“That’s where a student driven security operations center makes a lot of sense for us because it allows the students to help us with handling that workload alongside them getting experience,” he said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a roughly 30% growth in the cybersecurity workforce in the next ten years.
“Cybersecurity has been one of the fastest growing professions for a long time now and it’s one that’s still pretty resilient to the threat that AI presents for a lot of labor forces. Cybersecurity just needs a lot of accuracy that sometimes those kinds of models don’t support,” said Joshua Sitta, CEO of Sittadel. “You’re always going to have humans in cybersecurity because they need to be doing a good job always.”
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