The cooperation of White Hat IT Security and Obuda University continues uninterrupted in 2021/22
The cooperation of Obuda University John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics and infosec provider and consulting company White Hat IT Security continues despite COVID in the field of cyber security education.
Thanks to the joint efforts of dean Prof. PhD Miklós Kozlovszky and White Hat CEO and co-founder Sándor Fehér (OSCP, OSCE, CISM, ISO27001LA) the popular Blue Team & Security Operations subject was available for the third consecutive year this autumn semester. The curriculum of the subject matches that of White Hat’s Europe-wide unique WHCD – White Hat Certified Defender enterprise defence training.
This cooperation has started back in 2019 under dean Prof. PhD András Molnár, who entrusted the facilitation and strengthening of the relationship to the course representative of cyber security Valéria Póser PhD. The objective of this joint initiative was to give the students hands-on practical knowledge and skills currently lacking from the market and to establish a course that offers the highest niveau available and can keep up with the current cyber market trends – and at the same time is interesting, current and profitable in the short term for students. After finding that almost all available courses are offensive and focus on a small fragment of necessary information in this topic, White Hat had developed its WHCD course and with the university’s open and supportive attitude had integrated it into the academic curriculum – available for free for the top 25 students.
The course offered by White Hat is currently available at the market for a 1M HUF per student gross price. It offers theoretical background lectures and consultations led by experts on the field with 15-20 years of experience, completed by practical lab exercises that build upon own case studies and illustrate and analyse the individual steps of the defence procedure through the incident management of a lifelike APT attack – how the subsequent phases are structured, how they interact, and what roles this necessitates on the personnel side. The training is made more colourful by the guest lectures of internationally acclaimed foreign and Hungarian experts of the field.
Handling the market’s lack of specified human resources and preparing students for real-life tasks and challenges is inconceivable without the symbiosis of the academic and private sectors. This and the aim to keep the knowledge and intellectual capital accumulated over the years here and use it to build this community (despite working mostly for abroad) led White Hat, as this is a cornerstone of White Hat’s social responsibility. Fortunately, the Obuda University has become the ideal partner in this: helping them introduce hopefully hundreds of students and young experts this specific but increasingly important branch of the IT field and cyber security.
