ASU students pitch cybersecurity solutions at Cyber360 Spark Challenge

From phishing defense to smart IoT (Internet of Things) security and incident reporting, ASU students participated in a 24-hour hackathon-style event focused on cybersecurity, pitching solutions for real-world problems and showcasing student innovation for industry-leading partners. 

Kicking off National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Cyber360 Spark Challenge was produced in collaboration with Google and ASU Enterprise Technology.

Lester Godsey, chief information security officer at ASU Enterprise Technology, co-organized the challenge with Olivia Herneddo, lead experience designer with Enterprise Technology Affairs, and Omar Alkhatib, AI security engineer with ASU’s AI acceleration team.

For Godsey, the spark challenge is merely one step into creating a culture of cybersecurity at ASU.

“We're not just focused one month out of the year, but every day where everybody's thinking about cybersecurity,” Godsey said. “We want to just use this as well as the other activities we have planned this month to start building a culture of cybersecurity here at Arizona State University.”

The Cyber360 Spark Challenge is the first spark challenge with a cybersecurity-focused problem statement. While students are building solutions, Herneddo and Godsey are excited for the challenge to build their real-world cybersecurity skills.

“[We want] to encourage our students who are focusing on cybersecurity studies and give them real world examples of how they could translate what they're learning here at ASU into things that are valuable in industry,” Godsey said.

Godsey served as one of the judges in the spark challenge, alongside Chegg chief information security officer, Lonnie Benavides, and Mandiant customer engineering manager, Mark Butscher. Mentors of the spark challenge included ASU’s Rachel Clark, Robey Fickenscher and Omar Alkhatib, Google’s Richard Mendoza, and Chegg’s Trevor Constanzi.

“[ASU spark challenges] are distinctly unique in that they are accelerated challenges that leverage our partner network and cutting-edge tools to put them in the hands of qualified Sun Devils,” Herneddo said. “That's where innovation happens.”

Teams had a chance to choose which track to build a solution for – track one, which focused on incident response and investigating simulated cyberattacks; track two, securing a vulnerable smart system, emphasizing IoT device hardening; or track three, social engineering defense, focused on designing a phishing awareness campaign.

Team Incident Resolvers built a solution for track one: incident report form that triages incidents, organizing them from highest to lowest priorities, bridging the gap between IT communications and cybersecurity engineering teams.

The team is made up of ASU graduate students Bryan Ayala-Lug and Man Luo, who are studying computer engineering and IT, respectively, alongside undergraduate student Joshua Nguyen, studying computer science.

“Cybersecurity also has an aspect where, since technology is increasingly more involved in the real-world in many different ways, if something goes wrong with one of those, it affects all of us heavily,” said Ayala-Lug.

Team CyberPunk focused on track three, creating a program which will tell the user if a copy and pasted link or photo of a suspicious email is an attempt at fraud or phishing. The team is made up of IT graduate students Alay Patel, Dhaval Ghilnaiya, Krutali Thakkar, and Hitaxi Kachhadiya.

“Our model will identify the URL, it'll verify the domain with the actual domain purchases, then it'll look for the keywords,” Ghilnaiya said. “If it finds the particular keywords, we have the data set, asking about your identity or asking about your personal information, it’ll be flagged as suspicious.”

The Cyber360 Spark Challenge winners were Team Cyber Legion (graduate students Maanesh Mohanraj, Jeffery John Kennedy and Ben Stewart Silas Sargunam), who won a $2,000 scholarship and ASU vs. Penn State hockey tickets for October 4. Second place was awarded to Team Inferno (undergraduate students George Badulescu and Ash Srivastava), who won a $1,000 scholarship, ASU Icebreaker Tournament hockey tickets for October 10, and digital credentials which were awarded to all participants.

“It’s awesome, it was an amazing experience,” one Inferno team member said. “For us, it means we get to use this funding to further our education here at ASU and to learn more about cybersecurity.”

Looking ahead, Godsey hopes to produce more cybersecurity awareness events and activities for ASU students to participate in.

“Cybersecurity impacts everybody,” Godsey said. “And so the importance of cybersecurity is building that awareness as well as the tools and technology needed to protect us.”