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Free Workshop to Share Secrets of Social Media Cybersleuthing

UCF’s Institute for Simulation & Training will host a free workshop that will share the secrets of conducting online investigations by combing social media and the internet for clues.

The three-day workshop July 5-7 is entitled “Social Media and Open Source Intelligence Research and Investigation” and focuses on developing useful information from publicly available sources. The workshop is open to all UCF students, faculty and staff, regardless of computer proficiency.

The workshop will be led by Michael Gordon, a 29-year law enforcement veteran who owns Dataveillance, a company that trains law enforcement and those in private sector on conducting social media investigations.

Gordon will explain how to search Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms, as well as advanced Google search techniques and mobile applications. Attendees will also be shown how to set up their computers to avoid leaving digital fingerprints while searching for information.

Students and faculty from a broad range of disciplines would find the workshop useful, according to Bruce Caulkins, a faculty member in the Institute for Simulation & Training’s Modeling & Simulation graduate program and the UCF Center for Cybersecurity. The skills taught are valuable to those in computer science, security studies, criminal justice and many other fields, he said.

Institute for Simulation and Training July 2016 OSINT

For more information or to register for the workshop, email Julian Montaquila at jmontaqu@ist.ucf.edu [1].

The workshop is the latest example of UCF’s growing focus on cybersecurity.

In April, the university’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Club @ UCF – an organization led by and entirely made up of students – won its third consecutive national cyberdefense championship [2], besting teams from colleges and universities across America.

That same month, the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security recognized the strength of the university’s cyberdefense programs, curriculum, faculty and students by naming UCF a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education [3].

Last fall, IST launched a graduate certificate [4] in Modeling and Simulation of Behavioral Cybersecurity, a 13-credit-hour certificate program designed for part-time enrollment to meet the needs of those who work in cybersecurity, modeling, simulation and training without academic degrees in those disciplines.

This fall, the Modeling & Simulation graduate program [5] will begin offering a cybersecurity concentration for both its master’s and doctoral degrees.