The new student-run LSU Security Operations Center is beginning to bring other universities on board, with the goal of offering protection against cyberattacks for all of Louisiana higher education.
The university established two centers, one in Baton Rouge and another Shreveport, with the dual purpose of protecting campuses from cyberattacks and training students for the cybersecurity workforce. Such centers are expected to save the state money.
At a ribbon cutting ceremony Thursday for the Baton Rouge Security Operations Center, Gov. John Bel Edwards stressed the need to train students for the cyber workforce.
“If some of the brightest people in the world are working for the dark side, we want our brightest working for the light side,” Edwards said as he toured the center before the ceremony.
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Cyberattacks are happening with more frequency. Louisiana was swept up in the global MOVEit cyberattack, which compromised 6 million records from the state Office of Motor Vehicle.
Colleges and universities are similarly vulnerable. Earlier this year, Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond was the target of a cyberattack that crippled information technology at the university for weeks, although no personal information was stolen.
The LSU Security Operations Center (SOC), among the first of its kind, will work with state agencies to identify cyberattacks. It identified nearly 2,000 suspicious incidents in the past 30 days across three institutions, SOC leaders said during a demonstration Thursday.
“First one to get hit by a cyberattack alerts everybody else,” Louisiana Chief Cyber Officer Dustin Glover said in a press release. “The shared SOC allows us to take advantage of everyone’s disadvantage — we can’t stop that first attack — but we use that to our advantage by sharing threat information from multiple sources, so everyone is better protected.”
The Security Operations Center will employ students, starting with LSU’s flagship campus and eventually expanding to Southern University and Baton Rouge Community College. The work is open to students of any discipline. Students will be trained to work with private partners Tekstream and Splunk to handle suspicious incidents.
“Higher education is a high-value target for attackers, and you’re never going to change that,” Glover said. “You have labs, students, staff and faculty. You have dorm rooms and class rooms, third-party vendors. This becomes very complex to manage from a security perspective.”
Over the next two years, the 30 in-state schools connected to the Louisiana Optical Network Infrastructure, a state-owned, high-speed data network managed by LSU, will be placed under the Security Operations Center’s watch at a rate of about four institutions per quarter.
So far, the center is serving LSU and LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans. LSU Shreveport has its own center that will work in concert with the flagship.
LSU expanded its Security Operations Center through a $7.5 million appropriation from the legislature, originally requested in Edwards’ executive budget proposal.
Universities will gain cloud access to shared SOC capabilities but will also have the option to establish their own centers. So far, only Louisiana Tech University in Ruston has announced plans to set one up.
The establishment of the Security Operations Center is a major accomplishment for LSU President William Tate. A common theme across his vision for the university, which he calls the “Pentagon Plan” — which prioritizes academics in agriculture, biotech, coast, defense and energy — is the need for a robust cyber workforce and cybersecurity.
“You have to have cyber if you’re gonna do precision (agriculture), you have to have cyber if you’re going to do great biomedical research, you have to protect people’s medical records, their assets, their individual records, as well as a large collective work that might be happening in science,” Tate said.
