UNC Charlotte's College of Computing and Informatics is launching a pilot program this spring to provide essential resources to local businesses and organizations vulnerable to cyber threats.
The community outreach initiative by the College of Computing and Informatics was inspired by the department's decades of nationally recognized work in the industry. The program is designed to offer local people, organizations, nonprofits, small businesses and governments free and practical advice on how they should improve their cybersecurity practices.
The initiative is led by Bill Chu, managing director of Charlotte's CyberDNA Center; Vinicius Da Costa, adjunct faculty in cybersecurity; and Cori Faklaris, assistant professor of software and information systems at UNC Charlotte. They aim to kick off the pilot in March and wrap up in May, spanning about six to eight weeks.
Chu told CBJ that as part of the first phase, the program is looking to recruit one or two client organizations in the Charlotte region and provide them the pro bono services the pilot offers. The clients would be required to fall under the private, public or nonprofit sector and be in need of the proper resources to carry out their own cybersecurity threat modeling and risk assessment. Leaders of the program are encouraging those interested to fill out a client application form to be considered.
"We're looking at an organization that feels like: 'Hey, we really have not paid much attention to cybersecurity,' or 'We haven't paid enough attention to cybersecurity, and I've heard about all these stories about cyber breaches and privacy violations, and I wanted to know more about what I could do,'" he said.
Five students at UNC Charlotte will also have the opportunity to take the program as a class, gaining consulting skills and working with the selected clients on cybersecurity risk assessment. They would interview the partner organizations and identify the most appropriate way for them to mitigate cybersecurity risks, Chu said.
The risk of cybersecurity threats at local organizations, especially for nonprofits, is fairly large. Nonprofits tend to hold sensitive information on people that is poorly secured, he said.
"So, you're talking about tens of thousands of potential information that is at risk of a data breach," Chu said.
UNC Charlotte hopes the pilot will be the first step toward the school establishing its own clinic, inspired by the national Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics. That organization was founded in May 2021 to help expand the reach of cybersecurity clinics. There are 15 universities across the U.S. that are active clinics under the consortium.
"We are inspired by this model, a national initiative," Chu said. "We feel like we want to bring this to the Charlotte region and to North Carolina."
