UWF Center for Cybersecurity unveils new tech wonderland in the heart of Pensacola

Despite the University of West Florida Center for Cybersecurity's reputation for excellence, a lot of local folks still aren't fully aware of what the center is and what it does.

So starting today, the center's team is going to start showing them.

The Center for Cybersecurity is celebrating the grand opening of its new home in downtown Pensacola. The new facility, housed on the second floor of the Studer Community Institute Building at 220 W. Garden St., includes an array of state-of-the-art labs for training, education and simulations.

The center will also host tours, outreach summer camps for K-12 students and public demonstrations to help show off all the cool things students are learning and doing there.

"It's a huge opportunity for us to connect with the community and with businesses, and to really expand not just the UWF footprint downtown and throughout Pensacola, but to also expand interest and awareness in cybersecurity," said Eman El-Sheikh, director of the Center for Cybersecurity and professor of computer science at UWF.

"We're big believers that cybersecurity needs to be everyone's business: from kids in grade school to businesses and defense organizations. The new space really provides opportunities for us to connect, engage with them and ensure these organizations are secure."

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Many of the center's interior walls are made of glass, so that visitors to the building can look into any lab or classroom and see what's happening.

For instance, a server room in the main hall has LED lighting that can be programmed just to display a pleasing carousel of colors, or to light up specific parts of the system while an instructor describes what it is and what it does. 

A prominent monitor in the main hall displays a world map with a dizzying array of red lines darting from one country to another, each one representing a cyber attack occurring in real time.

Steven Bazzell, system server administrator, said the tracker was tuned to show only a fraction of the attacks that are happening, because attacks happen too frequently to realistically display them all.

"A lot of businesses think, 'Oh, it will never happen to me. I only hear about it in the news every now and then,'" Bazzell said. "That doesn't mean it's not happening."

Cybercriminals will steal an estimated 146 billion records and cost businesses about $8 trillion over the next five years, according to a 2018 study by Juniper Research.

Much of the training that occurs at the center is designed to simulate real world cyber attacks as closely as possible, so that students can hit the ground running when they enter the workforce.

The center houses the Florida Cyber Range, a virtual training environment created in partnership with Metova CyberCENTS that provides advanced hands-on training and testing. The system can emulate the internet, replicate websites, integrate social media and support dynamic interjection of vulnerabilities, allowing academic, government, military and industry cybersecurity staff to practice detecting, defending against and defeating a wide variety of threats.

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It's a playground for problem-solving and creative thinking, exactly the type of thing that drew UWF junior and cybersecurity ambassador Jasmine Collins into the program.

Collins first developed an interest in the filed when she accidentally downloaded a virus onto her computer and tried to troubleshoot it herself.

"Just figuring out that what that virus was and how to solve it was when I started looking into technology," Collins said.

She heard about UWF's cybersecurity program from a friend, and after talking with El- Sheikh about the need for women in technology-centric fields, Collins said her passion for the field only increased. Now she serves as one of the center's six cybersecurity ambassadors, meeting local students and spreading her knowledge and enthusiasm with them.

Overall, one goal of the new center is make cybersecurity something tangible that local students and businesses can see themselves being a part of.

"We want to bring cybersecurity to life," El-Sheikh said.

The UWF Center for Cybersecurity is the regional hub for cybersecurity education and research. UWF has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

For more information about the UWF Center for Cybersecurity, visit uwf.edu/cyber.

Kevin Robinson can be reached at krobinson4@pnj.com or 850-435-8527.