Binghamton University Student Taking on Cyberthreats

Many Binghamton University students spend their summers back in their home towns and relaxing after completing another taxing year of school. Jennifer Seibert, however, spent her last summer taking on cyberattacks.

Get our free mobile app

According to a report by Chris Kocher of BingUNews, Seibert spent her summer contributing to an investigation in cache attacks, which use stored user data and could contain personal information of the user. During her time with the Carnegie Mellon University program, Seibert would create apps posing as the victim and writing the attacker code used against the victim so that architecture could be built to protect the victim from the attacker code.

"An adversary can go into the cache to track the victim and extract encryption information," said Seibert. "Using our architecture, you can track the cache misses, which can be a good indication if there's an attacker in the cache."

As the world continues to rely more on the internet in every aspect of life, cybersecurity has become one of the most important industries in the world. Just a few weeks ago, Governor Kathy Hochul appointed the first ever Chief Cyber Officer in New York to spearhead the strengthening of the state's cybersecurity protocols. Cybersecurity attacks can be very difficult to detect and very costly for both companies and individuals.

According to Kocher's report, in addition to the program she did last summer, Seibert is working as a software engineering intern at a defense company and is very involved on Binghamton's campus. She's a member of a professional sorority for women engineers, Binghamton Codes, which teaching coding to students from other fields, and Girls Who Code, which teaches girls from elementary school through high school how to code, an organization which she will be the president of this school year.