With leadership from the Ying Wu College of Computing (YWCC), NJIT has been awarded a $1 million grant through the U.S. Department of Education that will support expansion of NJIT’s current student-powered Security Operations Center (SOC), establishing a student-run AI-enabled cybersecurity clinic, and create a secure high-performance computing infrastructure integrated with NJIT’s existing Wulver HPC system.
Supported through congressionally directed spending sponsored by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, the project aims to address the need to protect critical infrastructure, businesses, public institutions, non-profit organizations, and individuals throughout the state of New Jersey and is well-aligned with YWCC’s strategic plan surrounding transformative, experiential learning that directly responds to emerging workforce needs in an increasingly AI-enabled threat landscape.
YWCC Dean Jamie Payton, the grant’s principal investigator, views NJIT and its Ying Wu College of Computing as uniquely qualified to address the critical challenges facing local, state and national concerns amidst the exponential growth in AI-related and other cybersecurity breach events. The project builds on the university’s existing strengths in cybersecurity education, industry-leading research by renowned faculty experts, and its designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense by the NSA/DHS.
NJIT’s student-powered SOC, the Highlander Watch, was established and is operated by NJIT’s Information Technology Services unit as a professionally supervised service that provides monitoring and threat analysis to external clients, including public institutions and organizations that lack sufficient internal cybersecurity defense capacity. This project will expand training, experiential learning, and internship opportunities for students to gain hands-on, first-response experience in everything from alert triage, incident response workflows and escalation procedures to the use of vulnerability management tools and threat intelligence resources as part of the SOC.
Additionally, the project enables YWCC to establish a pilot offering of a student-run AI-enabled cybersecurity clinic, which will provide pro-bono consulting cybersecurity support to small businesses, non-profit and other community-serving organizations that are often impeded by a lack of affordable cybersecurity expertise.
“Together, the SOC and cybersecurity clinic are models to create high-impact experiential learning for students while expanding cybersecurity support for organizations that may not have the capacity to employ their own cybersecurity teams,” said Payton.
A central feature of the entire series of project initiatives is YWCC’s focus on the concept of AI + X: in this case, AI + cybersecurity.
Payton added, “This dual focus – AI for cybersecurity and cybersecurity for AI – will prepare students for emerging roles in the public and private sectors while also contributing our expertise and resources to building a more secure infrastructure for our external community.”
