Missouri University of Science and Technology will host a cyber security workshop and competition this September in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories to help train professionals to better combat the latest threats to online privacy and security.

The event, called Tracer FIRE, will be presented by the Missouri S&T Association for Computing Machinery student chapter’s special interest group on security, Sept. 12-14 in the university’s Interdisciplinary Engineering Building. The event will educate and train university students in various cyber security skills, including incident response, forensic investigation and analysis, file systems, memory layout, and malware analysis.

There will be a keynote technology talk 5-6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12, presented by two cyber security experts from Sandia National Laboratories. Alex Pease is a senior team member of the technical staff in Sandia’s Cyber Security Technologies Research and Development group. Alex Quintana helps lead Sandia’s threat intelligence team, where he directs a team of cyber defense analysts to protect national security mission information across various classification levels.

Saturday and Sunday’s events will take place in the university’s Interdisciplinary Engineering Building and are divided into two sections. Mornings will feature workshops focusing on a variety of cyber security topics in the active defense realm as well as hands-on training with forensic analysis tools that focus on defensive analysis and training the participants to use adversarial-based analogies. In the afternoon, attendees will be divided into teams for a competition that will require them to apply what they have learned during the morning workshop. During this competition, the teams will solve cyber security challenges involving a range of forensic analysis techniques.

Sandia National Laboratories, a federally funded research and development center, has national security missions in areas that include energy, defense systems and analysis, international non-proliferation of nuclear materials, and performing research and development activities for a variety of government agencies.

To combat cyber-attacks, Sandia conducts research and development to ensure strong cyber defenses and to arm its cyber defenders with advanced technologies and comprehensive threat intelligence.

For more information and to register for the event, visit http://acm.mst.edu/security.