2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

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.

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

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.