In a new press release from Indiana University, they made an exciting announcement about a new cyber security operations center. It is located at Indiana University and is a joint partnership with Northwestern University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Talk about some heavy hitters joining up to fight crime!
They call their new center OmniSOC. It is a specialized, sector-based cyber security operations center. The goal of the center is to “provide trusted, rapid, actionable cyber intelligence to its members.” It hopes to have all involved universities work together with a goal of helping “higher education institutions reduce the time from first awareness of a cyber security threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere for members.”
Tom Davis, one of the founding members of OmniSOC, likens university campuses to “small cities, with sensitive data and powerful computing systems that are coveted by cyber criminals.” He is hoping that OmniSOC can create a collaborative environment that optimizes the cyber security field for the professionals that work there, and obtain greater real time detection and opportunities for cyber threat management. Part of the spur for this project was the fact that, as Greg Hedrick, the CIO at Purdue, stated: “Higher education is for the most part an open environment, so we often see cyber crimes that others have not. By allowing us to monitor across higher education, OmniSOC helps to improve our capabilities to identify and react more quickly to these bad actors. My hope is that this information can be shared with others outside of our community in order to protect the entire ecosystem.”
Eventually the hope is also to have even more universities as part of the project, therefore increasing the scale of the services and the sophistication the center. Because more is better, right? Unless Superman isn’t on your team…