Four Seton Hall students will take part in the Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, an annual
cyber policy competition. Teams compete to develop national and international security
policy recommendations to tackle a fictional cyber incident.
The team consists of Chimdi Chukwukere, Allison Risewick, Neeharika Thuravil, and
Nicole Gizzi. The team will be coached and mentored by Eric Lopez, a security architect
and adjunct professor at Seton Hall University. As part of the challenge, the team
will respond to a major cyber incident affecting a key component of the world’s critical
infrastructure and services.
Nicole Gizzi, a student IT analyst and junior majoring in IT Management, Finance,
and Marketing, said "Cybersecurity interests me because it is a field that is always
changing and evolving. When I enrolled in the Cybersecurity Bootcamp two years ago,
never did I think that I would consider it a career; now it is all that I think about
every day. " Gizzi adds she is "excited to not only compete in the Geneva Cyber Competition
alongside my teammates but also represent Seton Hall around the world in the Cybersecurity
industry."
The Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is a unique competition designed to provide students
from a range of academic disciplines a deeper understanding of the policy challenges
associated with an escalating cyber incident and potential cyber conflict. Part-interactive
learning experience and part-competitive scenario exercise, it challenges teams to
respond to a realistic, evolving, multinational cyber security incident. Competitors
must analyze the threats posed to national, international, and private sector interests.
"In a world that has become even more digitally connected than ever, where business
transactions, government relations and lifelong connections are made and built online,
I am most interested in how cybersecurity overlaps into national security and how
policies can be developed to address pre-emtively, the ever-evolving cyber challenges",
said Chimdi Chukwukere, a graduate student in the School of Diplomacy and International
Relations. Chimdi said "most excited about the case brief that we have been given
because it is fictionally situated in a future African Union context. As someone who
is originally from Nigeria and by extension Africa, working with my colleagues on
the brief just creates a possibility feel of what the future could hold for me. Someday,
I might be sitting in the African Union Directorate of Cyber Security (DCS) to craft
policies that will help secure the entire continent against potential threats."
The Challenge is not just a competition, however. Students and professionals have
a unique opportunity to interact with and receive feedback from expert mentors and
high-level cyber professionals while developing valuable skills in policy analysis
and presentation.
Allison Risewick, a graduate student in the School of Diplomacy and International
Relations, said she is "really interested in learning about cybersecurity through
legal lenses, particularly in international law and privacy law. Cyber-attacks have
been increasingly used as a form of espionage and threats against other States, and
since it is relatively new, there's not a lot of protection against them covered under
customary international law." She adds "I'm excited about this being a new experience
that I'm partaking in and just to learn more about cybersecurity itself since it is
a new field I am interested in exploring further."
In partnership with the Atlantic Council, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)
hosts one of the eight annual Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenges. To date, the Geneva
competition has engaged over a thousand students from several European countries,
the United States, India, South America and beyond.
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