Cybersecurity is about the protection of digital assets. From identity theft and social media hacks to cloud security and malware attacks –– Dr. Lucy Tsado said the need for cybersecurity and digital forensics is growing daily.
As professor of criminal justice at LU, Tsado focuses her research on cybersecurity, cybercrime and digital forensics. Just this February, her research culminated in the publication of a new book, The book was a collaborative effort among Tsado and Robert Osgood who serves as director of Digital Forensics and Telecommunications at .
“Almost every day now, you hear of a cyberattack. Cybersecurity is a whole field where we talk about how to not only prevent digital criminal behavior, but also how to address it, investigate it and preserve evidence,” Tsado said. “Cybersecurity is a very big career field right now in the United States. As we all know, there are a lot of cyberattacks going on and in response to that, we need people to gather information, which falls under digital forensics.”
According to Tsado, cybersecurity can be dealt with at the individual level, organizational level, federal, state or local government level and it can mean many different things to many different people. Osgood, a 26-year veteran FBI computer forensics examiner and technically trained special agent, said that cybersecurity is a battle that has been fought since the 1980s. “I remember working as a rookie FBI agent and I was working some white-collar crime cases where we were seizing computers,” he said. “The problem was there was nobody around to figure out how to effectively, safely and legally extract that data from those devices, so I started to get into this field as a general need to.” He later went on to form the first FBI computer forensics squad in 2000 and served as Chief of the FBI’s Digital Media Exploitation Unit.
From the onset of the World Wide Web, Tsado said that cybersecurity has taken on a life of it’s on and as did the way in which information is stored digitally. For millennials, and the generations that follow, Cloud computing has more recently served as a primary source for storing digital information of value, but Osgood warns that human error is the number one culprit in failing to protect what he calls digital gold.
“The weakest link in cybersecurity is unfortunately us as humans. How many of us in the world have ever taken a Posted note and written our password on it and placed it on our computer screen? How many of us have used the password ‘password’ or ‘1234?’” he asked, raising his hand. “We need to use more complex passwords phrases that we can remember, but a password that can’t easily be guessed through basic encryption algorithm.”
Both Tsado and Osgood describe their book as a one stop shop for students and advisors, providing information about education, certifications and tools to guide them in making career decisions within the field. In the book, the two also detail how to help students and administrators understand the opportunity that exists in the cybersecurity and digital forensics field.
“The first step in getting ready for this field is to purchase our book,” Tsado said jokingly. “This is a very wide field, so we want our students to figure out where they fit in this field and jump right in.” Attending conferences, joining cybersecurity competitions, game-a-thons or earning a certification in cybersecurity are just a few of the things that Tsado suggests for those interested in the field to gain experience.
“This is an opportunity for students who are studying criminal justice, accounting, engineering, business, psychology –– you name it. From computer engineering all the way down to lawyers, we have a place for almost anyone in cybersecurity,” said Tsado who also has an accounting and management information systems background. “Once they have that passion for the field, they can just jump right in.”
For more information on cybersecurity, visit
lamar.edu/artsciences.
Professor Lucy Tsado recently sat down with to shed light on how to protect yourself against cyber attacks.