2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

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.

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

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.