Kofoworola Idowu had studied geophysics as an undergraduate, but when she pivoted to systems administration for an oil and gas servicing company in her home country of Nigeria, she developed a deep interest in cybersecurity that would change her trajectory.
As a systems administrator, Idowu had experience managing IT infrastructure, configuring networks and servers, maintaining systems, troubleshooting issues, and ensuring everything ran securely. “I thought, ‘Now that I’m dealing with data, what’s the next thing? ‘” says Idowu. “I decided the best thing was to learn how to protect and secure the data that I was working with.”
She joined the Master’s program in cybersecurity at Yeshiva University and began exploring machine learning and cybersecurity. Eventually, another student told her about Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and its Scholars program (formerly known as Trusted CI Student program), a partnership with the Sustainable Horizons Institute (SHI).
As a Trusted CI Scholar, she presented a poster, “Real-Time DDoS and Phishing Attack Detection for Banking Security,” at the NSF Cybersecurity Summit. This poster showcased her student team’s work on AI-driven threat detection in cybersecurity, looking at real-time distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and phishing attack detection for banking security. Their system correctly identified attacks about 90 percent of the time while keeping false alarms low.
Through the Summit, she met and has maintained contact with Trusted CI Fellows and other industry experts. But meeting Dr. William Marfo, an Associate Specialist with the Cascadia Region Earthquake Science Center (CRESCENT) at the University of California, Davis and a current Trusted CI Fellow, at the Summit transformed Idowu’s career trajectory. She is now a machine learning researcher in Dr. Marfo’s lab.
Idowu is now interested in the audit side of cybersecurity and preparing for the exam to become a certified security operations center analyst (CSA) to monitor, detect, and respond to cybersecurity incidents.
She credits the Trusted CI Scholars program with introducing her to the right people and new opportunities. “You meet people in the industry, as well as teachers, and when you say that you have been a Trusted CI Scholar, it opens doors,” says Idowu. “This program is the opportunity of a lifetime.”