2nd Annual Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

It's no secret there's a cybersecurity workforce shortage right now. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, there will be over 3.5 million job openings in the market by 2021. Moreover, it is a struggle to keep curriculum and classes up-to-date with such a fast-growing and evolving industry. As a result, we need to continue to find new ways to take difficult cybersecurity topics and make them more accessible to students as well as train them in the hacker mindset.

In this talk, Jake will explore how Cyber Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions can function as a key part of cybersecurity education and examine what makes a successful learning-based CTF. Using MetaCTF as a case study, we'll walk through how four Virginia students went from competing in CTFs to creating their own cybersecurity training company. Finally, we will end with some concrete ways to improve security education in the classroom to better train our future workforce.