Cybersecurity is becoming more of an identifiable role in our society, with more chips, tools, and computing getting intertwined into our network, the more security we need. This means more employees are needed, especially as the current state of employment nationally is critically low. As we try to provide internship opportunities to prospective students, we often get asked “What does a Cybersecurity Engineer even do?” to which we have some personal accounts from our very own Cyberdome Interns. Dallin Baird stated:
An engineer’s roles and responsibilities are largely intertwined with the security of an organization’s infrastructure and networks. The main objective is to ensure that adequate security controls are being implemented to allow effective confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. The engineer will design, build, and continually monitor different security solutions with the intent to bolster the organization’s security posture and protect the IT infrastructure. (Baird, 06/2022)
Specific roles will vary depending on the organization you work for, their goals, assets, and business will all change the things they need done. Here at the Cyberdome, we focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness, education, and security coverage to small rural communities and students who work here. We believe that you are only as strong as your weakest link, so we strive to build Idaho up to a secure and strong state.
Besides our rural coverage, which is predominantly a Cybersecurity Analyst role, we have many other projects that our staff and interns are involved in. Engineers at the Cyberdome have and are currently working on a variety of different projects like Virtual City, Manticore, Raspberry Pi Escape Room, Hackfort Workshops, VulnLabs, and more. Kevin Guan said, “I was able to work on a lot of different projects that stretched my comfort zone in a good way. Among my other co-workers, all of them have the traits that make them amazing people to work with. Overall, the experience was super beneficial to me since I was able to learn a lot of skills (both IT-related and non-IT-related) that aren’t really taught in school.”
On top of students’ assigned jobs, there often are many opportunities to help with other related tasks for the Cyberdome or IPC. One engineer, Isaac Bard has helped build a server cluster, create a virtualized city, debugged, and learned a variety of security-related pieces of software, and is currently learning an API for a software integration. “My time as an engineer for the institute has been exciting and very diverse. I would say the main job of being an engineer at the institute is to critically problem solve. That sounds vague, but the amount of complex and nuanced issues that pop up around here would surprise you.” said Isaac, “Being an engineer at the institute means being able to learn and tackle new problems all the time. Keeps you busy, but as a consequence keeps things interesting, to say the least.” Another Engineer, Michal Le explains his experience on the projects he’s been a part of:
My most valuable experience so far in this internship is Hackfort. At Hackfort, we were tasked to create an environment to educate the public about Cybersecurity training and at the same time represent the Institution publicly for the first time. During this time, we ran into multiple complications one after the other and it was only Eric, Dallin, and I on this project. I was working on both the management of the virtual machines as well as the networking for this event. To be honest, I thought it was doomed to fail but we worked very well together and finally had working solutions. (Le, 06/2022)
You’ve probably noticed a few times now people mention the community of student Engineers at the Cyberdome. We often work in teams, and if you aren’t working in teams, you get introduced to the many different employees with strong skill sets who may be of use to you in your tasks if you run into problems. “As the first Engineering team of our institution, our goal is to develop and lay a foundation for future Engineers and Analysts that follows our paths. This includes developing security exercises, scenarios, and environments for training, building our documentation repository for new members, configuring, and securing our network infrastructure, creating tools to automate processes, outreach and teaching our community, as well as creating potentially Idaho’s first cross-school Cybersecurity competitions. Though our team is small in size, our highly ambitious projects are worked on by highly ambitious people and have proven to be very successful with our public projects so far.” Michael Le said. Our engineers are getting the Cyberdome ready for you right now, so apply! We hope to work with you soon.