Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing career fields, but it is still a comparably new discipline, one where the set of “must-knows” changes rapidly. Methods and tools must be agile and proactive to identify, intervene, and prevent digital security breaches.
Kane and many fellow department faculty members openly share their course material online. Kane posts course content on GitHub.
Kane’s site is a learning tool for his students. It’s also a space to collaborate and problem-solve with the wider community.
"Cybersecurity is in a state of constant change — textbooks go out of date way too quickly to be useful," added John Franco, UC professor of computer science and Kane’s doctoral adviser. "Sites like GitHub have become of supreme importance to knowledge dissemination."
Kane, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from UC in 2005, became a malware analyst at GE Aviation in 2011, a time when very few companies staffed dedicated malware analysis roles. Much of his early work in that position was self-taught, building internal protocols from scratch that became the foundations of their cyber security team operations today.
"My role was to learn how to do malware analysis and then try to teach all the other analysts who may not have that as a dedicated job,” Kane said.
Based on Kane’s extensive experience, Franco, who had been Kane’s undergraduate faculty advisor, invited Kane to join a team of adjunct faculty from Northrop Grumman and GE Aviation to develop and teach courses related to the cyber operations graduate certificate program the department launched in partnership with the National Security Agency in 2015.
“I want to make sure that the next ‘me’ who's struggling right now to do this at their company can have more resources available to them today than I did 10 years ago when I tried to do this,” Kane said.
