2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

Breakfast Sandwiches: individually wrapped fresh, English muffin or bagel with egg, cheese and your choice of bacon or sausage

Gluten Free Bagels

Fresh Fruit Platter: a beautiful display of sliced fresh fruit to include sweet golden pineapple, ripe melon, colorful berries, seasonal fruit and seedless grape clusters

Assorted Soft Drinks: classic coke, diet coke, sprite, ginger ale

Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice

Coffee and Tea: freshly brewed fair trade locally roasted coffee, decaffeinated coffee and a selection of green, black and herbal teas served with cream, sugar, sweeteners and lemon

Chilled Spring Water: refreshing cool ice water with lemon wheels ​​​​

Cybersecurity career paths are more diverse than ever, yet many students struggle to gain the experience employers expect for entry-level roles. In this welcome address, Stephanie Travis explores one often overlooked pathway into the cybersecurity workforce: military service. Drawing on her experience as a U.S. Air Force cyber operations veteran, Maryland Air National Guard squadron commander, and former cyber workforce development leader at Virginia Tech, she will discuss the challenges facing today’s students and how Active Duty, National Guard, and Reserve opportunities can provide valuable training, experience, education benefits, and a strong foundation for a successful cyber career.

This is a live, tech-talk-style demo on using AI to speed up rubric design in Canvas, starting from an assignment you already have, not a blank page. I'll show how AI can extract the observable grading criteria straight from existing assignment instructions, then build those criteria into a fully weighted analytic rubric: which competencies matter most, what each performance level looks like, and how points should be distributed accordingly. From there, I'll convert that rubric into Canvas's import format and load it live, skipping the manual Canvas Rubric tool entirely. Faculty review stays the checkpoint at every step: AI drafts, you decide. Attendees leave with a repeatable workflow they can apply to any assignment they already teach, in any discipline.

A demo of the Virginia Cyber Range's new "error state" exercise diagnostic tool being made available to all users! Before now, users and educators had limited visibility into the events that led to the instability of the environment. With this new tool, we can expose the shell history, system logs, and configuration files to users for analysis.

We understand not everyone (especially students) is an expert in these systems so, to help out, we additionally run the information through an AI to try and point you in the right direction. We hope this extra information will help you and your students!

Today’s brilliant minds are being recruited and conditioned to hack without remorse. The growth of CTFs and cybercrime is creating a new threat—Hacker Gangs. It starts with curiosity and then progressively increases to full-on hacking, as small wins receive appreciation from peers that once ignored these amazing minds. Join Jessica Gulick to discuss how we can create a Defender’s Code that helps our youth stay on the right path and make better decisions without hindering innovation and curiosity.

Miniature Breakfast Pastries:  a variety of mini muffins, Danishes, assorted nut loaves with glazed cinnamon rolls.

Superfood Snack Bars: house made bars with dried fruits, seeds and nuts. Individually wrapped ~vegan, gluten free, contains nuts~

Assorted Soft Drinks: classic coke, diet coke, sprite, ginger ale

Coffee and Tea:  freshly brewed fair trade locally roasted coffee, decaffeinated coffee and a selection of green, black and herbal teas served with cream, sugar, sweeteners and lemon

Chilled Spring Water:  refreshing cool ice water with lemon wheels

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming cybersecurity. However, its greatest impact on education may not be the addition of new AI courses or technologies. As AI evolves from a productivity tool into an intelligent collaborator, it challenges long-held assumptions about what students should learn, how they learn, how they are assessed, and which foundational skills will define the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. Preparing students for this future requires more than updating cybersecurity curricula; it requires rethinking the educational experience itself.

Drawing on lessons learned from the ongoing evolution of GMU’s cybersecurity engineering programs, this keynote explores the opportunities, challenges, and difficult tradeoffs involved in redesigning cybersecurity education in the age of AI. Rather than presenting a single institutional model, it proposes a practical framework of design principles that educators, academic leaders, industry partners, and policymakers can adapt to their own educational contexts while preparing students for an increasingly AI-driven profession.

The cybersecurity workforce gap is not simply a shortage of candidates: It is also a preparation issue. Students often enter internships with foundational academic knowledge but limited experience applying it in team settings within professional environments. This session presents a structured internship model developed by Triple Point Security to address that gap through an incremental, cohort-based approach designed to complement academic coursework at the post-secondary level.

The program is organized around two complementary learning tracks: technical skills and professional development. On the technical side, interns progress from foundational concepts during their initial session through internal IT support, externally-facing projects, and proof-of-concept development in subsequent sessions with documentation and presentation treated as a core professional competencies at every stage. On the professionalism side, dedicated programming covers cybersecurity career pathways, certifications, written and verbal communication, responsible use of AI, and resume development. Structured networking roundtables featuring staff from across the firm, as well as external guest presenters, broaden interns' professional connections beyond their immediate team and the firm.

Attendees including university and community college faculty, academic program coordinators, and industry professionals will gain a concrete framework for designing or improving internship experiences that build both technical depth and professional readiness. The session will address program structure, the role of “soft skills” in workforce preparation, and practical considerations for establishing partnerships between cybersecurity firms and academic and other partner institutions.

GT Edge AI will be presenting on Build Your Own AI Cyber Home Lab powered by Dell and NVIDIA!

AI is reshaping cybersecurity, but most people's experience stops at ChatGPT. Home labs are already a proven way to build cyber skills, and this workshop extends that model to AI.

In this hands on workshop you will build your own AI agent, no code and no prior AI experience needed, and point it at a real security task like phishing triage, incident response drafting, or tutoring a student through a cyber concept. Along the way you will pick up the foundations that make it all make sense: what inference is, how tokens work, and why the choice between open and closed models matters. All of it demonstrated live rather than on slides.

You will also see where the data actually goes. We will run the same agent two ways, on a hosted model and on a fully air gapped local system, and compare them side by side. That difference is the whole ballgame for anyone handling real phishing samples, student records, or anything sensitive, and it is the question every school and organization is about to face.

You will leave with an install runbook to rebuild the lab at home, and a classroom ready module you can run with your own students.

Built for educators, students, early career practitioners, and the AI curious. No prior AI experience required.

This 90-minute workshop provides a comprehensive blueprint for organizing, managing, and scaling a successful student-led Capture the Flag (CTF) program. Led by the team behind the Valentine-themed GMU HackFax x PatriotHacks and Marvel-themed HackFax 2025 CTFs.
Timeline & Breakdown:

• 00:00–00:20 | Story & Organization: Narrative on growing a student-led CTF to a 10-category operation, managing a 72-hour event, and securing strategic partnerships with AWS, Virginia Cyber Range, and other companies.
• 00:20–00:35 | Collaboration Ecosystem: Best practices for managing cross-organizational workflows between student clubs, development teams, faculty, and sponsors.
• 00:35–01:00 | Challenge Development: An inside look at the design process for different categories from development to deployment. The team will also break down how challenges were documented so anyone could learn them and how 3 skill levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced were accommodated for.
• 01:00–01:15 | Blueprints & Lessons Learned: Actionable recommendations, platform bottleneck takeaways, and a browser-based showcase of the Virginia Cyber Range Cloud CTF interface to demonstrate rapid deployment.
• 01:15–01:30 | Open Q&A Panel: Interactive floor with the CTF Development Team to answer audience questions regarding scaffolding, scaling, and student engagement.

 
Technical Requirements
- Laptop with stable network connection
- Virginia Cyber Range Account with ability to join Cloud CTF via browser

Have your students encountered issues following handouts or documents in the Cyber Range before? Have you ever felt a bit overwhelmed with aligning courseware to exercise environments? Or maybe you’ve even had issues with students jumping ahead of steps in an assignment, resulting in errors and confusion.

If you’ve dealt with any of that, you’ll likely be interested in hearing about our upcoming exercise area feature, which could help alleviate those struggles.

In this session, we’ll highlight our Side-by-Side feature that allows integration with our courseware and virtual machines. We’ll explore key functionalities and capabilities that this feature provides, including:

-Displaying laboratory exercises and the virtual machine side-by-side
-Allowing students to submit answers to the lab questions within the interface
-Empowering instructors to download student submissions to review and grade

Join the folks from the Support Team to discover how you can incorporate this feature into your Cyber Range courses and enhance the learning experience for your students!

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"Cyber Range Sidekick! Courseware and Virtual Machine Integration" Slides

Barbecue Chicken:  white and dark meat bone-in chicken pieces basted with our sweet and savory barbecue sauce

VEGAN, VEGETARIAN, GLUTEN FREE OPTION: Quinoa Stuffed Peppers: colorful bell peppers stuffed with quinoa baked and served with tahini sauce on side

Grilled Corn on the Cob:  sweet corn on the cob, brushed with olive oil and our own salt and pepper spice blend ~gluten free, vegan, vegetarian~

Potato Salad:  diced red potatoes with green pepper, onion and spices tossed in our creamy house made dressing ~gluten free, vegetarian~

Citrus Spinach Salad:  tender spinach leaves, fennel, orange pieces and roasted onion tossed in a citrus vinaigrette dressing ~gluten free, vegetarian,vegan~

Miniature Dessert Bar: Platter our baker's selection of cherry crumble, salted caramel chocolate chip bars, fudge brownies or blondies ~vegetarian~

Jalapeño Corn Bread:  traditional house made corn bread with chopped jalapeño peppers

Assorted Soft Drinks: classic coke, diet coke, sprite, ginger ale

Coffee and Tea:  freshly brewed fair trade locally roasted coffee, decaffeinated coffee and a selection of green, black and herbal teas served with cream, sugar, sweeteners and lemon

Chilled Spring Water:  refreshing cool ice water with lemon wheels

Skills-Based Hiring on the Digital Front Lines
How the DoW CIO is balancing academic pathways, apprenticeships, and hands-on capability to build a faster, more efficient cyber workforce   

In academia, the GPA is a vital metric of a student's discipline, theoretical mastery, and intellectual endurance. But on the cyber battlefield, the ultimate metric is operational readiness. This creates a critical tension: how do we bridge the gap between a student who excels on paper and a practitioner who can actively defend a network under live fire?


The Department of War (DoW) heavily values the foundational rigor of higher education, continually investing in traditional pipelines like the Cyber Scholarship Program (CSP). However, to outpace modern adversaries, we are expanding our aperture. Through our integrated Skills-Based Hiring (SBH) initiative and registered apprenticeship programs, the DoW CIO is shifting how we assess incoming talent. We are not moving away from academic excellence; rather, we are augmenting it with a strict, practical mandate: "Show us what you can do."

The DoW does not dictate academic curricula, but educators must be aware of how the national security apparatus is evolving its evaluation of talent. This presentation provides a transparent look at the DoW’s multi-tiered hiring ecosystem, exploring how we balance academic achievement with hands-on, skills-based assessments. By understanding these diverse pathways, educators can better advise their high-performing students on how to translate their academic success into immediate, mission-ready capability.