Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness month with Purdue!

Events

Events are for everyone, including students, faculty, and staff. All times are listed in ET. Learn more about BTAA Events

See overview of events:overview of events

Introduction to CERIAS

Explore Cybersecurity & AI research with CERIAS! CERIAS will be on campus to engage and answer any questions you may have. WHEN: September 30th, 11:00 am - 1 pm WHERE: Purdue Northwest, CLO 153

National Cybersecurity Alliance Gameshow

Cybersecurity is everyone's responsibility, and this October, the Big Ten Academic Alliance invites you to join colleagues from across higher education for a month of engaging virtual events focused on cybersecurity awareness, resilience, and innovation. Throughout the month of October, you'll have opportunities to learn from industry experts, campus leaders, researchers, and practitioners as they share insights, best practices, emerging trends, and practical strategies for navigating today's evolving digital landscape. Regardless of your role at your institution, whether you're faculty, staff, or a student, you'll find sessions designed to expand your knowledge, spark new ideas, and help you strengthen cybersecurity within your role and your organization. WHEN: Oct 1st, 1:30pm ET. WHERE: Virtual. Questions? Contact ciosupport@btaa.org.

How to Survive the AI Apocalypse

It seems that the harder and faster we work, the more there is to do. And now we have AI. What does this mean for your job today, your longer-term career, your ongoing well-being? Join us to consider what the problem really is, ways to approach this problem, and get leave with suggestions for how to manage this for you and your team.WHEN: October 6th, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

CERIAS Security Seminar

Twenty years ago, the first post on the CERIAS blog took apart the rule that passwords must be changed every month. NIST retired the practice in 2017; some standards still require it. That is how a security myth works: a plausible claim, repeated in enough checklists, becomes infrastructure, and nobody audits infrastructure that seems to be working. The newest myth is that AI makes security professionals optional. This talk separates the three claims that marketing bundles together. AI tools do find flaws in shipped code, and the evidence from Google, DARPA, Mozilla, and Microsoft is real. Autonomous agents do add kinds of risk that no deployed security architecture was designed for. Neither fact implies that fewer people are needed. The vulnerability flood of 2026 is an audit of forty years of deferred engineering, not a crisis AI created, and the bottleneck has moved to the human capacity to verify, coordinate, and fix. The organizations that bet on replacement are already rehiring, often at a premium, the judgment they discarded. Open positions in the field number in the hundreds of thousands. For students, the message is direct: AI is not replacing you; it is generating your workload. The talk closes with what grows, what shrinks, and how to prepare. The capacities that make you a professional are the ones that do not become obsolete with the next model release. WHEN: October 7th, 4:30pm - 5:30pm. WHERE: Science Building (INLD), Room LD 002, Purdue Indianapolis & Virtual

BTAA CISO Panel

Higher education institutions face security challenges that demand thoughtful, coordinated responses across many of our distributed environments. Addressing these challenges effectively requires not only structure and leadership but also a shared understanding of the complexity that underpins our work, all the while meeting the mission of teaching, learning, and research. Our panelists will cover topics related to risk within our organizations, how to build and deliver a strong security awareness program and culture, and where they see the security space evolving to further educate and promote security in the higher education space. WHEN: October 8th, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

The CIS AI Journey

Most organizations are being asked to adopt AI faster than they can answer basic questions about how to do it safely. At the Center for Internet Security, we chose to build our AI program governance first, before scaling use across the organization. This session walks through that journey candidly, including the questions we got right early, the ones we underestimated, and the places where our first plan needed real adjustment. Brian Calkin, CIS Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, will share how CIS stood up an AI governance board and a technical subcommittee, deployed enterprise AI tooling to staff, and worked through the security and data questions that surfaced along the way. What data can these tools touch? How do we vet vendors? Who reviews an agent before it acts on its own? How do we keep cost and sprawl under control? The talk focuses on what actually worked, what we changed, and what we are still figuring out. For higher education, the stakes are distinctive. Research, administrative, and IT environments each carry different data sensitivities and risk tolerances, and scaling AI across all three without a shared governance foundation invites trouble. Attendees will leave with a practical starting framework they can adapt, a set of questions worth answering before broad rollout, and a clear view of the tradeoffs from an organization living them now. WHEN: October 13th, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual. NOTE: Recording will be available after fall break.

Leading Secure AI Adoption in Higher Ed

As universities rapidly adopt AI, leaders must balance innovation with security, privacy, and compliance. Drawing on experience leading cybersecurity initiatives across government and industry, M. K. Palmore will share practical governance strategies for managing AI risk, strengthening institutional resilience, and aligning cybersecurity with organizational priorities. Attendees will leave with actionable frameworks to support secure AI adoption across higher education. WHEN: October 15th 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

State of Critical Infrastructure

Learn how to guard what powers Purdue: critical infrastructure & data protection with the Big Ten Academic Alliance! WHEN: October 20th, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

The Way We Travel the World Is at Risk

The Way We Travel the World Is at Risk: GPS Origins, Recent Disruptions, and Alternative Paths to Resilient Positioning. Abstract: GPS was formally approved as a U.S. Department of Defense program in December 1973 and developed as a military system for precise three-dimensional positioning, navigation, and timing—driven in large part by requirements for accurate munitions and missile guidance. The first developmental satellite launched in 1978; the system reached full operational capability in 1995. Civilian access was authorized beginning in the 1980s and later expanded widely into aviation, maritime shipping, and consumer devices. Its radio-frequency signals in the L-band enable global positioning through time-of-flight ranging, yet the same open, relatively weak signals that made GPS ubiquitous have become a systemic vulnerability. Recent incidents illustrate the stakes: a man jamming the Denver International Airport in January 2022 disrupted GPS over a roughly 50-nautical-mile radius for about 33 hours, affecting aircraft and other critical infrastructure; GPS jamming contributed to the 2024 Azerbaijan Airlines crash (38 fatalities) after loss of navigational aids near Grozny; AIS anomalies linked to GPS interference preceded the 2025 Front Eagle–Adalynn tanker collision near the Strait of Hormuz; and widespread jamming in Ukraine has driven the rapid adoption of fiber-optic-controlled drones. Mitigation efforts range from stronger LEO signals (Xona Space Systems' Pulsar) to physical tethers that bypass radio entirely, multi-modal feature fusion architectures that incorporate optical flow and geo-registration (such as Northrop Grumman's ANAGDA), and inertial/photonic systems. This talk examines these approaches as partial mitigations of a radio-based paradigm and contrasts them with fundamentally different sensing modalities—such as visual and topological fingerprinting of environmental features developed by Xphera—that reframe the positioning problem itself. Ultimately, this illustrates a broader cybersecurity lesson: every technology has inherent weaknesses, and it is common to develop tunnel vision focused solely on mitigating the risks of the original solution. Sometimes the most effective path forward is to return to identify the problem at a foundational level and apply different technologies to achieve the same outcomes. WHEN: October 21, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm. WHERE: Virtual

Trust without a connection: layered security for disconnected mission compute

Abstract: Military, intelligence and critical infrastructure systems increasingly runAI and mission workloads at the edge. That means contested, disconnected, andphysically exposed environments where the usual cloud security assumptionsfail. You can't count on a reachable identity provider. You can't trust thehost operator. You can't patch on demand. This talk is a case study in building a defense-in-depth model for thatenvironment. It follows the stack from the bottom up: Confidential computing. Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP isolate workloads even from a compromised host, and remote attestation verifies them. Software supply chain assurance. Immutable, signed OS images ship with SBOMs, continuous vulnerability scanning using Trivy and Grype, and STIG compliance reporting. Policy-as-code authorization. Cedar provides fine-grained, analyzable access control across compute, storage, networking and AI agents. Policies keep enforcing when the link to the enterprise is gone. Identity lifecycle. SCIM federates with enterprise directories without making them a runtime dependency. We'll examine the design tradeoffs, the threat models behind each layer, andwhere the gaps remain. Examples are drawn from Mainsail's work on Starlight. WHEN: October 28, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

Introduction to the Evolving Federal Research Cybersecurity Landscape

Federal requirements around research cybersecurity are growing quickly, and university IT teams are increasingly the ones expected to put them into practice. This session offers a plain-language introduction to that landscape: what the new requirements are trying to accomplish, where things stand today, and why work that used to live in research compliance offices is showing up in the systems IT teams build and support every day. The conversation pairs a national policy perspective from EDUCAUSE with practical resources from the research security community, plus a look at how IT, security, and research offices can partner effectively. WHEN: October 29, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm. WHERE: Virtual.

For any cybersecurity awareness related questions or training requests, please email  cyberaware@purdue.edu.

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