Cal Poly Pomona marked a milestone by recently celebrating its 20th anniversary Cybersecurity and Awareness Expo with a forward-looking theme: “Unlocking the power of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity”.
The October 17 event highlighted the transformative role of AI, both in enabling and defending against cyber threats. AI capabilities were showcased to generate phishing prompts and even write malicious code, highlighting the challenges security professionals face. At the same time, industry experts and students explored how AI can strengthen defenses, raise awareness, and empower the cybersecurity community to address these evolving risks.
“The cybersecurity industry evolves every year, but there is a consistent theme when considering phishing attacks and social engineering: they target individuals every year, again and again. That’s why we try to organize awareness events like this to highlight the risks involved,” said Christopher Laasch, Acting Director of Information Security. “We do our best to teach people the methods hackers use to attack you and how you can defend yourself. This year, AI is taking over like no technology since blockchain.
Interactive demonstrations from Cal Poly cyber clubs, including sheCodes./Script and MISSA engaged participants with phishing simulations and explorations of the vulnerabilities of AI tools like ChatGPT. Industry leaders from IBM, Splunk, Cisco and Trellix discussed topics such as AI threats and quantum computing, adding a real-world perspective to the academic environment. Students and faculty also presented their research, using the show as an opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing.
The day concluded with a cybersecurity career fair, where companies like CrowdStrike, Southern California Edison (SCE), and the CIA met with budding talent, providing insights and opportunities in the evolving field of cybersecurity.
The show continued its tradition of highlighting opportunities for women in cybersecurity, with demonstrations from sheCodes, Women in Technology andWomen’s Cyber Jutsu Society.
“SheCodes is a community bringing together women and other underrepresented groups in STEM. We are open to all kinds of majors; you don’t need to be a computer science major. We are also open to all experience levels,” said Erika Ledesma, senior computer science student and president of sheCodes. “If you are interested in coding or want to develop your skills, we have opportunities for you to do so. »
At the event, sheCodes demonstrated AWS Comprehend, a natural language processing (NLP) tool that uses machine learning (ML) to detect phishing emails. They trained the model on an email dataset that allowed AWS Comprehend to determine whether or not a given email input text was a phishing attack.
Cal Poly Pomona students and faculty also shared their research at the event. Advised by Professor Tamer Omar, electrical engineering seniors Shakira Guzman and Joshua Castilla presented drone detection using a radio frequency project. This was an ongoing project started five years ago by a previous team.
“We can detect enemy drones with a predefined database using the radio frequency of the transceiver. The code has changed from previous semesters, but the machine learning code helps determine the type of drone by using different equations to compare the data we compiled with our database,” Guzman said. “It took hours, the previous team’s time, just to build the structure of what we’re doing now, and the accuracy was 80%. We made things faster, more efficient and used different methods to ensure there was a protector.
In a first cycle computer science In the CS 4990 course, taught by Professor Abdelfattah Amamra, students explore the integration of AI into cybersecurity.
“The overall concept is to implement artificial intelligence in the field of cybersecurity. We try to simplify the logs with extended language models (LLM) or AI, so that the user can understand them easily,” said Gerardo Solis, senior computer science student. “Ideally, if we can make things as simple as possible, it means employees can enjoy a more productive work environment and focus on other things they ultimately need to do.”
The fair also featured a poster competition including entries from CSULB, CSULA, Chaffey College, Coastline College, Chino High School, Nogales High School, Los Nietos Middle School and Cedarlane Academy.
To view presentations and posters from the event, you can visit the CSAF YouTube page or the Cyber Fair website.
