CPP Celebrated its 20th Annual Cybersecurity and Awareness Fair with AI
Cal Poly Pomona marked a significant milestone, recently celebrating its 20th annual Cybersecurity and Awareness Fair with a forward-looking theme: "Unleashing the Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Cybersecurity."
The Oct. 17 event spotlighted AI's transformative role in both enabling and defending against cyber threats. AI’s capabilities were showcased for generating phishing prompts and even writing malicious code, underscoring the challenges faced by security professionals. At the same time, industry experts and students explored how AI can strengthen defenses, raise awareness, and empower the cybersecurity community in tackling these evolving risks.
“The cybersecurity industry changes every year, but there is a consistent theme when you consider phishing attacks and social engineering—they target individuals every year, over and over again. That's why we try to do awareness events like this to showcase the risks involved,” said Christopher Laasch, interim director for information security. “We are trying our best to teach people the methods hackers use to attack you and how you can defend yourself. This year, AI is taking over like no technology since blockchain.”
Interactive demonstrations from Cal Poly’s cyber clubs, including sheCodes, ./Script, and MISSA, engaged attendees with phishing simulations and explorations of vulnerabilities in AI tools like ChatGPT. Industry leaders from IBM, Splunk, Cisco, and Trellix spoke on topics like AI threats and quantum computing, adding a real-world perspective to the academic environment. Students and professors also showcased their research, leveraging the fair as an opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing.
The day concluded with a Cybersecurity Job Fair, where companies like CrowdStrike, Southern California Edison (SCE), and the CIA connected with aspiring talent, offering insights and opportunities in the evolving cybersecurity field.
The fair continued it tradition of highlighted opportunities for women in cybersecurity, with demonstrations from sheCodes, Women in Technology, and the Women’s Society of Cyber Jutsu.
“SheCodes is a community bringing women and other underrepresented groups together in STEM. We are open to all kinds of majors; you don't have to be a computer science major. We are also open to all levels of experience,” said senior computer science student and sheCodes President Erika Ledesma. “If you have an interest in coding or want to expand your skills, then we have opportunities for you to do so.”
During the event sheCodes showcased AWS Comprehend, a natural language processing (NLP) tool that uses machine learning (ML) to detect phishing emails. They trained the model on an email dataset that allowed AWS Comprehend to classify if a given email input text was a phishing attack or not.
Cal Poly Pomona students and faculty also shared their research during the event. Advised by Professor Tamer Omar, electrical engineering seniors Shakira Guzman and Joshua Castilla presented on drone detection using a radio frequency project. This was a continuing project started five years ago by a previous team.
“We can detect enemy drones with a pre-made database using transceiver radio frequency. The code has changed from previous semesters, but machine learning code helps determine the type of drone using different equations to compare the data we compiled to our database,” Guzman said. “It took hours of the previous team's time just to build the structure of what we do now, and the accuracy was at 80 percent. We made it faster with more efficiency and used different methods to make sure there's a protector.”
In an undergraduate computer science class, CS 4990, taught by Professor Abdelfattah Amamra, students are exploring the integration of AI into cybersecurity.
“The whole concept is to implement artificial intelligence into the realm of cybersecurity. We are trying to simplify logs with large language models (LLM) or AI, so the user can easily understand it,” said senior computer science student Gerardo Solis. “Ideally, if we can simplify things as much as possible, that means employees can have a more productive work environment and focus on other parts that they need to in the end.”
The fair also featured a poster contest that included entries from CSULB, CSULA, Chaffey College, Coastline College, Chino High School, Nogales High School, Los Nietos Middle School, and Cedarlane Academy,
To see presentations and poster entries from the event, you can visit the CSAF YouTube Page or the Cyber Fair website.