WASHINGTON — Free medical clinics and legal aid clinics, where college students and their instructors help their communities while also learning more about their professions, are now commonplace. Google hopes to add cybersecurity clinics to that list.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledged $20 million in donations Thursday to support and expand the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics to introduce thousands of students to potential careers in cybersecurity, while also helping defend small government offices, rural hospitals and nonprofits from hacking.
Pichai said the new initiative addresses both the rising number of cyberattacks — up 38% globally in 2022 — and the lack of candidates trained to stop them.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai attends a workshop with college students June 22 at the Google office in Washington. Pichai pledged $20 million to support and expand the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics to introduce thousands of students to potential careers in cybersecurity.
“Just as technology can create new threats, it can also help us fight them,” Pichai said, announcing the commitment at Google’s Washington offices. “Security was critical to the work I did early in my Google career, including when we built our Chrome browser. Today, it’s core to everything we do, and the current inflection point in AI is helping take our efforts to the next level.”
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The tech giant launched the Google Cybersecurity Certificate program last month to help prepare people for entry-level cybersecurity jobs. It also partnered with universities in New York on a research program to create learning and career opportunities across the cybersecurity sector.
“Making sure we protect and safeguard both the consumer services and the enterprises services we provide is foundational to the company, which is why we treat it as such,” Pichai said. “We’ve been building security from the ground up for a long time and training to innovate and stay ahead.”
Google’s announcement had support from congressional members on both sides of the aisle. Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte of California said addressing cyberthreats is essential to the country’s economic competitiveness as well as national security. He added that China will likely produce twice as many computer science students with doctoral degrees this year than the United States.
“We need to incentivize students to pursue careers in fields like cybersecurity to reverse that trend,” he said. “We must all embrace the idea of becoming lifelong learners.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas said Google’s initiative helps democratize cybersecurity, providing more employment opportunities and more protection to those not located in Silicon Valley.
“Small businesses literally can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every year,” Castro said. “I’m grateful to Google for building on their commitment to support the growth of a workforce necessary to do everything from securing critical infrastructure in local communities to bolstering our national security.”
Pichai said there are currently more than 650,000 open cybersecurity jobs and there is a need for a diverse workforce to address the issue. “We have seen this in the past when we’ve gone to communities and open data centers in rural communities,” he said. “It creates a spark. It inspires more people… These are catalyzing moments.”
Justin Steele, director of Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, said the initiative appealed to his team because it seeks projects where the funding can spawn change on multiple levels.
“It’s a challenge,” Steele said. “But there’s a huge opportunity here.”
Steele anticipates the cybersecurity clinics will have students help small organizations that lack their own technology departments with threat assessments and installing defenses.
“Those students get hands-on experience and they get to increase their marketability for all of these open jobs in cybersecurity,” Steele said. “We get to diversify the field of cybersecurity by training these students and we get to protect critical U.S. infrastructure.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai greets college students during a workshop at the Google office in Washington on June 22.
Ann Cleaveland, executive director of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley, said the clinics can help organizations “get over a sense of nihilism” about dealing with hackers. While many groups think there is nothing they can do against a state-supported hacker or ransomware attacks, the clinics can offer low-level solutions that can combat a large number of threats.
“Students can really help organizations overcome 80 to 90% of the problems and give them a much more resilient stance,” said Cleaveland, adding that the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics hopes to establish clinics in every state by 2030.
Mark Lupo, coordinator of the University of Georgia’s clinic, known as CyberArch, said demand continues to increase for the clinic’s services because more and more data is at risk. “We have continued as a society to bring more of our sensitive information online, so that vulnerability has only increased,” he said. “The malicious actors understand that sensitive data can be monetized, which, at some point in the past, was not even a thought. Now that there’s money there, they’re going to gravitate toward that.”
That makes cybersecurity and “all hands on deck” issue, said Cleaveland, who is co-chair of the consortium’s executive committee. She said Google.org’s donation will help the consortium establish new clinics, as well as provide mentors to the students staffing them.
How machine learning and new AI technologies could change the cybersecurity landscape
How machine learning and new AI technologies could change the cybersecurity landscape
The world has never been more online. From work meetings, emails, and texts to shopping, paying bills, and banking—the possibilities are endless. Technological advances save people time and give companies new tools for growth.
But that connectedness comes with a cost. The internet has also never been more rife with criminals looking for vulnerabilities to exploit, hoping to hold companies hostage with ransomware, executing crafty phishing and social engineering attacks, hacking into proprietary information, or capturing private data such as Social Security numbers and addresses.
Does artificial intelligence or machine learning make it easier or harder for companies to guard against such attacks? Can other improvements provide additional defenses against cyberattacks?
The pros and cons of some of the advances have recently burst into the news. Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” recently left Google to warn of the dangers of the very technology he helped develop. He worries that generative artificial intelligence—which can produce text, images, video, and audio—will be used for misinformation and someday even eclipse humans’ creativity. Others say those fears are hypothetical.
Drata compiled a list of five technological innovations changing how firms monitor and protect sensitive data essential to their digital operations.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence not only allows a computer to analyze large amounts of data quickly—a game changer as it speeds up response times for a company’s security operations—but it becomes more knowledgeable as it gathers more information.
These systems, which include machine learning, natural language processing, and speech recognition, can sort through millions of research papers, news stories, and other data. Industries such as health care, finance, transportation, entertainment, and real estate are all benefitting from the patterns these systems identify.
When their efforts are focused on cybersecurity, they can identify vulnerabilities and risks from hacking, phishing, and other attacks. But they can also spot potential new cyberdefense opportunities. And these systems can be taught to correct their own actions.
Machine learning
Machine learning, a subset of AI that has often been used interchangeably with it, actually refers to how a computer can improve its performance by interacting with data. The computer learns in the sense that it can change an algorithm as it receives more data. Machine learning can help more accurately detect possible attacks and prioritize which are the most likely and potentially dangerous.
However, as Georgetown University’s “Machine Learning and Cybersecurity” report notes, often these technologies are based on older long-standing methods, not new approaches, and draw attacks themselves. The report predicts machine learning is more likely to offer incremental improvements rather than fundamental new approaches—unless there are new breakthroughs in machine learning capabilities.
Chatbot technology
Chatbot technology is making tremendous advances. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, co-founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk. ChatGPT can answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests, according to OpenAI. Its name comes from the Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model.
More recently, Slack, a messaging app for business, announced plans to offer a chatbot technology called Slack GPT. It will summarize messages missed while you were out of the office, help with writing, take notes on calls, and more.
ChatGPT’s ability to write text and create code makes it valuable for nefarious uses. The system can write convincing phishing emails and ransomware code, jumpstart the effort required to build infrastructure and create applications to attack targets, impersonate people, or generate emails that might trick someone at a business into sharing confidential data. At the same time, it may be able to identify security threats.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality is a three-dimensional image created by a computer. Because it allows you to immerse yourself, it is particularly effective in cybersecurity and for various training exercises—in medicine and the military, for example. A realistic scenario can be created to simulate a cyberattack.
But virtual reality also poses risks. It may be collecting such data as retina scans, fingerprints, facial dimensions, and voice characteristics that could ease impersonation in the metaverse.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing allows access on demand and through the internet to applications, servers, networking capabilities, and more. Often, the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud infrastructure, while the customer is expected to protect data within the cloud. As a cloud user, you could be vulnerable to data breaches, cyberattacks, malware infections, and other attacks that exploit the layer you are responsible to secure on top of the cloud provider.
Data reporting by Dom DiFurio. Story editing by Jeff Inglis. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Abigail Renaud.
This story originally appeared on Drata and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
