Politico talks to Matthew Wright, department chair, Department of Cybersecurity, about AI voice cloning technology and its impact on the upcoming election.

The world’s greatest collection of cybersecurity talent assembled at RIT Jan. 11-14 for the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition (CPTC) global finals. The annual event wrapped up the largest offense-based cybersecurity competition for college students, which is hosted annually by RIT.

The best new talent coming into the cybersecurity industry will battle for a championship trophy at the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition global finals, held Jan. 11-14 at RIT.

RIT students can unlock a community through the university’s cybersecurity club, RITSEC. As one of the largest collegiate cybersecurity clubs of its kind, RITSEC helps make RIT a top place for cybersecurity education, training, and research.

Billy Brumley has been named the Kevin O’Sullivan Endowed Professor in Cybersecurity at RIT. As part of RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Brumley will contribute to the university’s growing cybersecurity research profile and lead expertise in side-channel attack analysis.

In a recent preprint paper, faculty and Ph.D. students in RIT’s  ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute, identified issues surrounding generative hate speech in Google’s PaLM2 Large Language Model (LLM), which powers Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Google was informed about the toxic content generated by PaLM2, and thanks to their responsible approach, have since rectified issues identified by the team in their initial study.

RIT is receiving $500,000 from the Google Cybersecurity Clinics Fund to train new cybersecurity professionals, while providing services for public good at the same time. The funding from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, is part of a $20 million collaboration with the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics that Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced in June.

RIT will lead eight universities in developing certificate programs to build and validate focused skills in governance, risk, and compliance. The pilot program is backed by $2.5 million in funding from the National Security Agency — which will make the training free for transitioning veterans and first responders.

Decorated researcher brings leading work in system security, cryptography engineering, and side-channel analysis.

Dr. Jay Yang named new Director of Research for RIT’s ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute