Weapons of Mass Disruption Dr. Tamara Schwartz

George Orwell imagined it in 1984. Star Trek imagined it with the Borg, when they promised that we would all be assimilated. The Internet of Things, or IoT in industry jargon, is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but rather the stuff of science fact, and it is disrupting everything. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz hands off the microphone to York College of Pennsylvania cybersecurity management student Will Galasso, who interviews Ian Panulla, a software architect and CTO about how IoT is changing the way we experience the world.

Social engineering is a behavior as old as humankind, though the terminology is traced back to Dutch industrialist J.C. VanMarken in 1894. Van Marken believed that the world needed people who could handle social (human) problems, in much the same way that engineers handled mechanical problems. Today social engineering is understood to be behaviors and methods used by hackers and other bad actors to gain the trust of targeted individuals in order to access money, property, or information, often involving impersonation of those who are known to us. Just as people are finally beginning to understand the threat of phishing emails, generative AI is changing the social engineering game with the rise of Deepfake technology. On thisepisode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz is joined by Dr. Matthew Canham, a former Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI and co-founder of Psyber Labs, a technology start-up specializing in deepfake analysis and the psychological information operation strategies being employed by attackers. You can find them at https://deepfakedashboard.com/

Most textbooks are pretty dry. They lay out a lot of facts, but they are rarely engaging. When beginning the project to develop a textbook for the CYB 100 Infowars class, one student suggested that the book should try to re-create the classroom experience students have at York College. In order to do that, students were included at all phases of the development process, and one student in particular collaborated on the development of the book by creating all the visual content. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz talks with her collaborator and student, Natilie McCallick, a senior cybersecurity management major at the York College of Pennsylvania about the experience they had while developing their new textbook on Information Warfare.

There has been a significant increase in maritime traffic in the last few decades as supply chains become more and more robust. With more targets of opportunity, there has been a parallel rise in piracy around the world. GPS has been an important technology to impact maritime navigation, but emerging technologies are not just facilitating better maritime travel, they are aiding piracy with capabilities like GPS spoofing. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz is joined by York College of Pennsylvania student Alex Kemble, a cybersecurity major and ship technician, as they discuss the impact of GPS spoofing on the maritime industry,

Boundaries come in many forms. They can be physical, verbal, psychological, emotional, virtual, and machine generated. Boundaries can be the subject of nation state conflict. They can be something you discuss while lying on your therapists couch. Boundaries come into play when we talk about establishing “work-life balance.” Since the launch of the Internet, boundaries have been changing, and Artificial Intelligence is continuing to push our proverbial boundaries. On this episode of WMD, I am joined once again by the author of the Polymathic Being Blog and recently published book Paradox: Book One of the Singularity Chronicles, Mr. Michael Woudenberg, as we become cartographers and explore the changing landscape of global boundaries.

One of the best parts of being a college professor is seeing students grow from recent high school graduates into young professionals. Students in the cybersecurity management program at the York College of Pennsylvania are required to complete a research project into a cybersecurity related topic of their choice. The students choose really interesting topics including the ethics of technologies, data privacy, the Dark Web, cyber risk, and just about anything you can imagine. On this episode of WMD, Dr. Tamara Schwartz hands over the WMD microphone to York College of Pennsylvania cybersecurity management students Matt DeSoye, Ty Foster, Jack Griffin, Colin Harris, and JJ Soyke to discuss their research and how it impacted their professional development as they head into their final semester, look for their first job, and begin “adulting”!