The need for strong cyber security and privacy protections, as well as a technical workforce to make it a reality was stated by President Obama in his January 20th State of the Union address: “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids.” It is projected that there will be a national deficit of 400,000 Cyber professionals in the United States and an estimated 1,000,000 shortage globally. In April 2015, the Secretary of Defense issued the DoD’s cyber strategy. Key points in this strategy are to accelerate research and development to build cyber capabilities and to establish a cyber modeling and simulation capability.
In response to this call to action UCF is establishing a “Cyber Alliance” to serve as a focal point for a number of cyber-related educational and research activities in our institution. Our “Cyber Alliance” web-site has information about the “Cyber Defense (CD)” minor offered at UCF (led by the CS Department), the people who teach CD courses, select publications that contribute to the state of the art in CD research, currently funded CD research efforts, accomplishments of student cyber teams and links to CD resources and events within UCF and around the world.