CWU News

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The legal profession has a role in a dynamic cybersecurity ecosystem. That is the message that Michael Hamilton, president, founder, and chief information security officer (CISO) for Seattle-based CI Security will be sharing November 12 during a presentation at CWU.

 

Hamilton will discuss “Cybersecurity: Challenges and Opportunities” in the Student Union and Recreation Center Theatre, starting at 10:00 a.m.

 

“CI Security offers information security consulting services, along with being a leading provider of what’s known as managed detection and response (MDR),” says Paul Knepper, chair of the CWU Law and Justice department.

 

MDR provides organizations with cybersecurity threat hunting services and, if discovered, responses. It allows organizations to gains necessary expertise they may not have internally.

 

Hamilton says his presentation will focus on the intersection of cybersecurity and the legal profession as they pertain, in particular, to third-party and supply-chain security.

 

“Privacy now drives security, through customer expectations and emerging regulatory requirements. The law profession is going to probably end up interacting with a patchwork of privacy statutes that will come out of 50 states before the federal government does anything,” Hamilton adds. “Sorting through that is not a technical problem—that is a legal one.”

 

Hamilton, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), is the former City of Seattle CISO, where he managed information security policy, strategy, and operations for 30 agencies. He also served as a policy advisor for the State of Washington Office of the Chief Information Officer.

 

Hamilton will be joined at the CWU presentation by John Anderson, National Crime Insurance Bureau special agent, who will explain “The Insurance Industry and Fraud Investigation,” and Todd Salter, inspector, who will outline “What Investigators Actually Do” pertaining to his work with the United States Postal Inspection Service.

 

The lectures are free and open to the public. The overall presentation, “Investigation, Security and Other Careers You Might Not Have Considered,”  will be followed by a career fair from noon to 1:00 p.m., which is open to all students at CWU.

 

“Recruiters from a variety of local, state and federal agencies will be looking to meet students,” Knepper adds. “A number of our students had asked about careers in investigation, security, and cybersecurity.” 

 

The presentation is the first this year in an annual campus series, presented by CWU Law and Justice.

 

“One day each quarter, we cancel all regular classes and students attend a lecture together on a particular topic,” Knepper explains.

 

CI security recently opened an Ellensburg security operations center (SOC), which will begin partnering with the university and its students. The SOC employs analysts who evaluate what’s taking place, in real time, on customer networks to investigate, confirm, and mitigate those that have cybersecurity implications.

 

Related monitoring is offered for free for local governments under Hamilton’s non-profit Public Infrastructure Security Cyber Education System (PISCES) project. Through it, the data goes to the Washington State Academic Cyber Range, for use in university-level coursework for students seeking cyber analysts careers, where they get to work with what Hamilton called these “live fire” situations. 

 

“Central Washington University will begin offer the curriculum in January,” Hamilton points out. “It just makes sense for us to locate our operations centers near the universities that have partnered with us, so we are able to generate a pipeline of new analysts.”

 

Knepper adds, “It’s about community engagement—CWU working with the private sector to enhance the well-being of people throughout our region.”

 

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Media contact: Robert Lowery, Department of Public Affairs, director of Radio Services and Integrated Communications, 509-963-1487, Robert.Lowery@cwu.edu

 

Photo: Michael Hamilton, founder and chief information security officer (CISO) of CI Security. Hamilton has served as a cybersecurity policy advisor for Washington State, is the former CISO for the City of Seattle, and former managing consultant for VeriSign Global Security Consulting. In a previous life, he was an ocean scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

 

Editor’s note: The scheduled for the program, in the CWU Student Union and Recreation Center, is:

• 10:10 to 10:40 a.m. — John Anderson, National Crime Insurance Bureau, “The Insurance Industry and Fraud Investigation”
• 10:40 to 11:10 a.m. — Michael Hamilton, Founder, CI Security, “Cybersecurity: Challenges and Opportunities”
• 11:10 to 11:40 a.m. — Todd Salter, United States Postal Inspection Service, “What Investigators Actually Do”