Student wins cyber research award

Four University of North Georgia (UNG) students pursuing degrees in cybersecurity had their research accepted for the inaugural Cybersecurity Research in Undergraduate Programs (CyRUP) Conference held April 6-8 at Norwich University, and one of them won an award.

CyRUP is a collaborative effort between the six senior U.S. military colleges dedicated to advancing cybersecurity research and to developing research opportunities for undergraduate students.

Logan Kern, Benjamin Bradley, and Chris Brown presented their research, while Dr. Tamirat Abegaz, associate professor of computer science and information systems, shared student Vanessa Welch's research at the conference.

"We are proud of our students' ability to conduct research and present it very well," Abegaz said. "I am inspired by their hard work and determination to solve complex cybersecurity problems."

The student's research projects were:

Research presentation

• Welch: "Impact of Covid‐19 on the Popularity of Cryptocurrency and its Security Risks."
• Brown: "Scanning for, Exploiting and Remedying LOG4J Vulnerabilities Using the Metasploit Framework."

Poster presentation

• Kern: "A Rogue Access Point Deployed by Drone and How to Defend Against It."
• Bradley: "Behavior Modeling for Policy Audit: Using Monterey‐Phoenix to Predict Emergent Behavior in Policies and Procedures."

Kern, a senior from McDonough, Georgia, won the best poster research award for his work investigating how to set up a WiFi network with a drone to maliciously steal people's information.

"I wanted to show what a bad actor could do with little or no technology knowledge," Kern said.