Though it’s not quite graduation season, 33 US military veterans celebrated the completion of their 12-week course and became the first class to graduate from Facebook Cybersecurity University for Veterans on Saturday, April 21.
Narrowing the cybersecurity skills gap demands that organizations get a little creative about how they train and recruit. That’s why Facebook partnered with CodePath.org and more than 200 students and professors across nine universities and colleges.
While Facebook tries to regain user trust, it is training veterans across every military branch to become defenders of the digital world. The 33 participants, all of whom had to have some background in IT or computer science, embarked on a cyber boot camp of sorts.
Over the course of the 12 weeks, the program focused on delivering the fundamentals of web application security. The veterans applied that foundational knowledge to gain a better understanding of offensive and defensive skills through a hands-on approach.
“They learned the basics of cybersecurity and common vulnerabilities and attacks, and they received hands-on practice in both exploitation techniques and strategies for protecting and hardening applications,” Facebook Security wrote in a post.
They met in Menlo Park, California, where they partook in a variety of sessions and labs as they reviewed broader security topics through videos and projects. Open source competitions allowed Facebook to bring the students closer to the real-world experiences of cyber-risk and -defense.
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