Fordham’s Center for Cybersecurity has secured a $125,000 grant from the United States Department of Defense to create a curriculum focused on AI-enabled cybersecurity tools.
Titled “Enhancing Cybersecurity Education through AI-Integrated Curriculum Development for Faculty,” the year-long grant will fund the creation of 10 teaching modules that will be used by other institutions that teach cybersecurity.
Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., director of the Fordham Center for Cybersecurity, said that he and Gary Weiss, Ph.D., professor of computer and information science, will work with academics from other universities and private sector experts to create the coursework. They will hold workshops over the next year to solicit feedback and finish in the fall of 2025.
Threat Detection and Response
Hayajneh said a key focus of this new curriculum will be employing AI for rapid threat detection and response.
“What people in the industry are trying to do with AI is automate most of those things that we used to do manually,” Hayajneh said.
“The readings, the observations, the analytics that we always have been doing—everything has AI being integrated into it,” he said.
“There is now AI-enhanced intrusion detection network security that’s used as a defense. But hackers also use AI to crack passwords and search for vulnerabilities in your system faster than before, so you have to test your systems with traditional attack capabilities but also with AI.”
Teaching the Teachers
The team’s recommended curriculum will be shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Defense for feedback, and the NSA will then make it available to eligible institutions through its digital library.
“The curriculum is designed for faculty from other institutions, with the goal of bridging the gap between institutions that don’t have the expertise and the capability to develop AI-related cybersecurity courses,” Hayajneh said.
“The ultimate goal is to teach the teachers.”
The grant is the fourth one of this type that the center has received. In 2017, it was awarded two grants worth $270,000 to develop a cybersecurity core curriculum and help build hands-on lab environments for cybersecurity training. In 2019, it received $300,000 to create a curriculum related to iOS and Android operating systems.
