NORTHFIELD — Sen. Patrick Leahy announced Thursday three grants totaling $7.3 million for cybersecurity education at Norwich University.
The largest — $5.9 million — comes from the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and the U.S. Air Force to develop a simulation-based cyber-exercise tool. A little over $900,000 will go toward scholarships for cybersecurity students, and $500,000 will fund the development of a research track on energy-resilience that includes cybersecurity issues.
“In 1819, we were founded to protect the Republic against the threat then. What was the threat in 1819? It was the damn Redcoats coming over the Green Mountains of Vermont — again. But that’s not the threat today,” said Norwich President Richard Schneider.
“The threat today, that our students are going to be really challenged with for the rest of their lives is this cyberthreat,” he said.
Leahy said his biggest security concerns aren’t about missiles — those, he said, come with a return address. The country they come from, he said, can be “obliterated within an hour.”
“The threat I’m worried about is that it’s the middle of January, it’s 5 below zero and the power grid goes down and nobody knows where it came from,” Leahy said. “You don’t know who you respond to, you don’t know which power did this to us.”
Students receiving the cybersecurity scholarships are already in classes, and the energy resilience research started earlier this year, Schneider said. But the biggest new endeavor, the DECIDE project to expand simulation cybertools from the financial sector to the energy sector, is now beginning and will continue for 36 months.
Leahy said national security experts in Washington emphasize the need to not only fund cybersecurity projects but the training and education of the people in that field.
“Equipment is easy, people who know how to run it isn’t,” Leahy said. “You can have the most advanced technology in the world, but you have to know how to use it.”
The university, which launched the first version of its cybersecurity program in 1999, and is now a national leader in cybersecurity education, is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year.
“As wonderful as Norwich is,” Leahy said, “its best years are still to come.”
