ITM students Bill Wesselman and Maya Embar display their award for ACM RIIT 2014 Best Paper.

The Best Paper Award at the 3rd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Research in Information Technology conference was won this year by the IIT ITM student team of Maya Embar, Louis McHugh, and William Wesselman for their paper “Printer Water-Mark Obfuscation”. Also presenting at the conference was ITM student Ben Khodja ( “Probabilistically Detecting Steganography withinMP3 Files” ) and ITM alumnus David Stacey (“Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis”). The IIT papers were presented at a session chaired by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. The RIIT conference was held in conjunction with the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education, October 15-18, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia. Congratulations to Maya, Louis, and Bill for this recognition of their accomplishment.

This is the second year that an IIT paper has won the Best Paper award at RIIT. At last year’s RIIT conference in Orlando, Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the IIT School of Applied Technology, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, won the award for their paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors”.

Three IIT ITM student research papers are being presented at the 3rd annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Research in Information Technology conference, being held October 15-18, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia in conjunction with the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education. IIT student papers “Printer Water-Mark Obfuscation” by Maya Embar, Louis McHugh, and William Wesselman; “Probabilistically Detecting Steganography withinMP3 Files” by Ben Khodja; and “Passive Warden Using Statistical Steganalysis” by David Stacey will be presented in the Friday morning RIIT session, which will be chaired by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. Also attending the conference will be Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the IIT School of Applied Technology.

At last year’s RIIT conference in Orlando, Dean Carlson, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, presented the paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors” which was awarded the Best Paper award from the conference. Also presenting at the 2013 conference were IIT alumnus Mikhail Zaturenskiy, “MP3 Files as a Steganography Medium,” and IIT ITM alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia, “DNS (Do Not Suspect).”

Congratulations to all of our students presenting this year and thanks as well to all of those ITM students who submitted their research for consideration for the conference.

How much space do you have on your MyIIT Google Drive? If your answer was anything less than infinite, you were wrong. According to an announcement yesterday on the Google for Education Blog, Drive for Education is available to all Google Apps for Education accounts at no charge and will include:

• Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks.
• Vault: Google Apps Vault, Google’s solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year.
• Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way.

Frustrated with the same old questions, Professor David Lydic rips open his shirt in the middle of class…

Dr. Lisa Wade, writing in the Sociological Images blog, pretty much nails things college professors hate: Professors’ Pet Peeves. And of course, all of your faculty are tempted every term to follow the lead of David Lydic of Austin Community College as shown in the picture at the right… Anyway, if you take heed of Dr. Wade’s cogent advice, we can all have a more pleasant semester!

Starting in fall of 2014, the undergraduate Specialization in System Administration will see a significant change. The existing curriculum features two six-credit-hour courses, ITMO 451 and ITMO 452. ITMO 451 is essentially a Windows system administrator course, while ITMO 452 has been a UNIX sysadmin course taught using Solaris UNIX. As of fall, ITMO 456, Introduction to Open Source Operating Systems, will replace the existing ITM 302 Hardware and Operating Systems II requirement for all students and will form the foundation of the System Administration specialization, which will add three new three-credit-hour system administration courses (a similar change will be reflected in the Graduate specialization as well.) The revised undergraduate specialization will then look like this:

System Administration
Focuses on the administration and management of servers.
   ITMO 441 Network Applications and Operations
AND select two courses from the following:
   ITMO 450 Enterprise End-User System Administration
   ITMO 451 Enterprise Server Administration
   ITMO 453 Open Source Server Administration
AND select two courses from the following:
   ITMO 417 Shell Scripting for System Administrators
   ITMO 444 Cloud Computing Technologies
   ITMO 454 Operating System Virtualization
   ITMS 458 Operating System Security

Read more…

IIT undergraduate Information Technology and Management (ITM) student Eric Tendian competed in the Cyber Aces State Championship offered by the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES). The competition featured the top 125 participants from a year-long competition led by Gov. Pat Quinn to identify individuals with skills conducive to seeking a cybersecurity career in the military or private sector.

The competition included NetWars, a simulation utilized by the U.S. Air Force, and a discussion of ethics. NetWars covers topics including system hardening, packet analysis, digital forensics, and vulnerability assessment. The ethics panel consisted of two cybersecurity professionals and one FBI agent in the cyber division, and was facilitated by a former White House-level IT manager.

Eric won two awards in the NetWars tournament – he scored 2nd Overall and was the first to advance to Level 2. Eric was among only 3 participants in the Illinois competition to make it to Level 3 and was the only non-professional to finish in the top 3. Even more impressive is that Eric is a first-year IIT student.

Bill Slater, Adjunct Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management, encouraged Eric to participate in the competition because of his strong cyber security skills. Professor Slater stated “it is impressive that one of our IIT ITM undergraduate students placed 2nd in the state. Especially since Eric competed against cyber security professionals and students with more years of cyber security experience.”

Eric was featured as a 2013 Fifty For The Future award winner from the Illinois Technology Foundation that recognizes 50 of the brightest technology students in Illinois.
Several other IIT students participated in the competition. See the complete results of the Cyber Aces Online course, the precursor to NetWars, at https://online.cyberaces.org/event/results/2013Fall/0?state=IL&regtype=College.

Registration for the next round of Cyber Aces Online opens August 1st.

More info on the championship can be found at http://www.cyberaces.org/championships/ and http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/palos/chi-illinois-hacking-competition-draws-cybersecurity-sleuths-of-tomorrow-20140302,0,4349193.story.

Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of the IIT Department of Information Technology and Management, was interviewed and quoted in 2 articles about the shortage of workers with cybersecurity skills and IIT’s Master of Cyber Forensics and Security program to Medill Reports Chicago.

Shortage of workers with cybersecurity skills rises just as need does

Chicago’s tech jobs are growing – but the number of graduates isn’t keeping up

ITMO is holding its second annual IIT on da Cloud event this Friday, October 25 from 12:00 to 9:00pm (open to all IIT students).

The event features guest speakers who will talk about cloud computing and how it is used. At 2:00 the event will relocate to the IdeaShop for a night of setting up full cloud systems and developing apps to run on this cloud.

Check out the event: https://www.eventbrite.com/event/8947216365
Check out the HackNight: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/8977095735/eorg

Fifty for the Future honoree Zeina Abdul Samad

Congratulations to three IIT students who have been selected to receive the 2013 Fifty For The Future® award from the Illinois Technology Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the development of the technology talent pipeline in the State of Illinois.

First-year ITM undergraduate, Eric Tendian, was nominated by ITM Adjunct Industry Professor, Bill Slater. ITM undergraduate Zeina Abdul Samad was nominated by ITM Industry Professor Ray Trygstad. The third IIT recipient is a Computer Science graduate student, Scott Krieder.

Each student, as well as the faculty member who nominated him/her will receive a $1000 scholarship to Directions Training’s extensive catalog of offerings.

The Fifty For The Future® Celebration is attended by information technology executives, industry leaders, judges, Foundation sponsors and other supporters of the technology industry. The students will receive their awards at the 7th Annual Celebration event November 12 at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Dr. Carlson and Dr. Hasso receiving the Best Paper award

Dr. C. Robert Carlson, Dean of the School of Applied Technology, earned the best paper award at the 2nd Annual Conference on Research in Information Technology (RIIT) held in conjunction with the ACM 14th Annual Conference in Information Technology Education (SIGITE), October 10-12. Dr. Carlson, along with Dr. Sargon Hasso, a former PhD student of Dr. Carlson’s, presented the paper “Design Patterns as First-Class Connectors” in the Software Development track. Their approach is a compositional model based on design patterns by abstracting their behavioral model using role modeling constructs. They demonstrated their technique by presenting a simple case study complete with design and implementation code. Dr. Hasso is currently employed at Wolters Kluwer.

Dr. Carlson was accompanied to the conference by Industry Professor Ray Trygstad, Associate Chair of IIT’s Department of Information Technology and Management. Professor Trygstad also serves as the Chair of the National Board of Directors for Gamma Nu Eta, the National Information Technology Honor Society. He represented Gamma Nu Eta, who was a Silver Sponsor for the conference.

Dr. Carlson also served as Session Chair for the presentations of “Leveraging HCI in Teaching Mobile, ‘Anywhere and Everywhere’ IT” and “Flipping the Classroom – Is it for you?” as part of the Mobile IT Technology track of the conference.

IIT alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia at the Poster Session

As part of the Security 1 track, IIT alumnus Mikhail Zaturenskiy, who worked with Professor Bill Lidinsky, presented his paper “MP3 Files as a Steganography Medium.” This paper looks at ways to hide information inside MP3 files and proposes four largely unexplored techniques: unused header bit stuffing, unused side information bit stuffing, empty frame stuffing, and ancillary bit stuffing.

As part of the RIIT Poster Session, IIT 2013 ITM alumnus Fernando Seror Garcia, presented his project, “DNS (Do Not Suspect).” The purpose of this project is to see if it would be possible for an attacker to use the DNS protocol to communicate with a bot of his own in an infected host in order to avoid being detected.