From her perch in Phoenix, Allie Urbaszewski peers at the group of girls in her line of sight.
The Grand Canyon University forensic psychology senior does what she does so effortlessly, teaching the basics of social engineering. It's when someone deceives a target into revealing confidential or personal information, like their Social Security number or their password, so they can commit fraud.
More likely than not, her mind is jaunting to and fro to explain social engineering to students in Paradise Valley. But today she’s sharing her love of cybersecurity with students, not in Paradise Valley, but in another paradise more than 2,800 miles away – in Hawaii.
Urbaszewski, who’s the university’s GenCyber student lead, taught a social engineering workshop via Zoom recently to schoolgirls from the Hawaii, Maui and Oahu campuses of Kamehameha Schools alongside GCU cybersecurity junior Viviana Pacheco. The workshop, dubbed "Stranger Danger: Cyber is More Than You Think," was part of the schools' Girls in Cyber series.
Both are dashing their way through a busy summer.
They work at the Cyber Center of Excellence in the Technology Building, where students go to hone their cybersecurity skills. But this summer, they’re also sharpening those talents in their internships – Urbaszewski’s as a project coordinator intern for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Pacheco for cybersecurity service ArmorPoint.
Somehow, they found time to squeeze in the social engineering workshop.
“This was my first time really doing something on Zoom like that to another location,” said Urbaszewski, who you’ll usually find in the cyber center helping conduct a slew of events for students and the community, from Technology Unplugged events to the monthly Lopes Cyber Con.
Although it’s quiet in the summer, “We have a lot of events going on here,” she said as she and Pacheco get ready for Welcome Week. “We’re always open for open house during Welcome Week.”
The opportunity to connect with students in Hawaii came up when Tim Freitas, senior technology specialist for Educational Technology Services at Kamehameha Schools’ Kapalama campus, approached Dr. Cori Araza, senior project director for K12 Services and Solutions. He was attending a professional development workshop that Araza helmed at the national K12 NICE conference recently in Phoenix. Always enthusiastic about sparking students’ interest in cybersecurity, he wanted to know if GCU could put together cybersecurity activities for the girls at his school.
Araza said, “absolutely,” and connected with university development counselor Shanay Adams, part of the Hawaii online team, who helped with the event onsite.
Urbaszewski and Pacheco conducted two sessions, one for fourth through eighth grade girls and the second for high schoolers.
Helming the event was a bit daunting, not only because it was their first Zoom session to students so far away, but because, just a day before, a faulty CrowdStrike software update caused Microsoft Windows computers and systems to crash around the world. The historic outage crippled airlines, banks, hospitals, government entities and emergency services, to name a few.
“It was nerve-wracking at first because of the whole CrowdStrike, the Microsoft incident, that happened the day before,” Urbaszewski said. “We were hoping everything would still work because GCU uses CrowdStrike – so just being able to make sure that everything updated properly and that the computers were all running.
“We were OK here, but then it was just making it so the connections still worked across Hawaii,” she said.
The logistics that had to be in place to make the Zoom sessions happen amazed Urbaszewski. Beyond the technology, Adams helped make sure everything ran smoothly.
“She (Adams) actually flew to Honolulu to help assist at the event in person. She was a huge help to us and just, especially, it’s hard trying to make that connection from Zoom to students when you can’t really see them (in person) and they can’t see you,” she said. “She actually helped make that connection, making sure they were understanding everything we were saying, and if they had any questions, she just made sure to relay it to us.”
Adams said, “We’ve had a wonderful collaboration between K12 Development, student workers and the Hawaii online team to support the Educational Technology Services department at Kamehameha Schools.”
The social engineering workshop wasn’t the first collaboration between the GCU campus and the schools in Hawaii.
At a previous technology event, titled the “Secrets of Ciphering,” Adams created a presentation with help from Araza. During the session, students created a cipher wheel to encrypt and decrypt codes. The hands-on project was developed in collaboration with STEM student worker analyst Srivatsav Chintapalli.
This second session was a big hit, said Adams: “We received great feedback from the students who attended.”
These events are being organized in hopes that they “would inspire them (the students) go to into cybersecurity” as a profession, Araza added.
It’s well known that the cybersecurity industry is facing a global talent shortage, with an estimated 4 million workers needed worldwide, reported the World Economic Forum.
That GCU-Kamehameha collaboration hasn’t waned.
Dr. Pam Rowland, associate dean of the College of Engineering and Technology, and Araza plan to visit Kamehameha Schools in October to assist with a family/community cybersecurity event as a result of the connection with Freitas and his school.
“We have been involved in growing their cybersecurity programs with the help and outreach of GCU’s College of Engineering and Technology," Araza said.
Urbaszewski was thrilled to be part of those efforts to use technology, like Zoom, to bring cyber to students who might not have as much opportunity as she and Pacheco do on a campus that touts its own cybersecurity center.
“There’s not a lot of opportunities like you would have on the mainland,” she said of working with Kamehameha Schools and looks back on her and Pacheco's summer, busy with their jobs, internships and connecting with students thousands of miles away. “ … This has been a lot of opportunity for the both of us.”
Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected] or at 602-639-7901.
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