Engineering Alumni Brothers Create UConn’s First Cybersecurity Instructional Lab

The Computer Science & Engineering Department is pleased to share news from the UConn Foundation and the School of Engineering.

In response to the growing field of cybersecurity, two University of Connecticut alumni brothers have donated $1 million to create a new cybersecurity curriculum and launch Altschuler Cybersecurity Lab, UConn’s first cybersecurity instructional lab.

Samuel ’50 and Stephen Altschuler ’54, who earned their UConn bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering, will cut the ribbon on the new lab, located on the first floor of the Information Technology Engineering (ITE) Building, sometime in summer 2019.

When fully launched, the lab will be dedicated to teaching hands-on cybersecurity to all Computer Science and Engineering freshmen, as well as other undergraduates and graduate students. A special freshman curriculum is being developed to teach cyber-hygiene in software and hardware and learn about vulnerabilities in commercial-off-the-shelf devices, Internet-of-Things devices, equipment to test the security and integrity of electronic election/voting systems, smart power-meters and power grid devices. The curriculum will also cover website security, secure configuration of networks and networked systems, and security of network routing. The UConn CSE Department is home to more than 800 undergraduate and 150 graduate students.

Stephen Altschuler (far left) and Sam Altschuler (far right) stand with their undergraduate scholarship recipients at a ceremony in 2015. (Christopher Larosa/UConn Photo)