A program of study at Georgia Northwestern Technical College (GNTC) is training students to guard sensitive information in a world where hackers are getting smarter every day.

“Cybersecurity is both protecting the computers of the world and finding security holes; it’s learning how to setup our networks and computers to protect them from threat agents who want to steal or destroy our information,” said Dwight Watt, instructor of Computer Information Systems Technology, adding that the technology also protects financial information.

“Thieves use phishing scams to ask people for information or ransomware in which they encrypt data in a form we cannot read and demand a ransom payment to get it back,” he said. 

“Our financial information, medical information and personal information are all stored on computer servers, and that information becomes a target for attackers,” said Rocky Spurlock, director of GNTC’s Computer Information Systems Technology program. “In Cybersecurity, our goal is to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data so that only the people who should have access to the data can access it, that the data has not been changed and that it is available when it is needed.”

GNTC launched its Cybersecurity program in 2016. Courses cover security policies and procedures, implementing operating systems security, network security, network defense and countermeasures, ethical hacking and penetration testing, and computer forensics.

“It is essential that organizations have trained Cybersecurity professionals to protect their organization’s data,” Spurlock said.