A “self-described hacker” was added to the University’s faculty roster this semester.
The level of resources is one of the reasons Golden G. Richard III joined the University staff as a professor of computer science and engineering and as an associate director for cybersecurity at the Center for Computation and Technology.
After teaching at the University of New Orleans for 22 years, Richard moved to Baton Rouge to teach the University’s first reverse-engineering and malware analysis class, CSC 4700.
“CCT [Center for Computation and Technology] is something magical,” he said, “It’s an amazingly dynamic community in a state-of-the-art facility.”
Students are seeing malware computer viruses that melted the internet down 10 years ago, and they are figuring out how to take these viruses apart and how they work,” he said.
They’re panic-stricken and having fun at the same time, he added. The students are seeing malware they’ve never seen before, and the natural inclination would be to drop the class, but with assurance, no one has yet.
Richard is also the owner of Arcane Alloy, LLC., a small consulting firm where he selectively works on real cases and cybersecurity.
It’s important to have experience in current cybersecurity cases to have “street cred” with the students, he added.
His goal is to build cybersecurity tools that people can use legally and to create tools that approach the things they can do in CSI.
His list of expertise includes performing digital forensics and computer investigations and finding evidence to help his fellow members of the Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force .
He works closely with the NSA and offers his services to law enforcement for free, he said.
Tangipahoa Parish police once pulled over a man that had a bag of thumb drives and computers, so they called secret service, which handles financial crime. The man said no one would ever be able to crack his laptop open, Richard said, and after months of failed attempts in federal labs, authorities sent the laptop to him.
After an hour and what Richard calls a lucky break, he was able to find a back door in the laptop to pop open. Hundreds of stolen credit card numbers were stored on the PC.
He said he self-identifies as a hacker. In the old school sense, that means trying to take things apart and finding every angle to make something work, he said. In some sense, that is what “black hat” or bad hackers do.
Defensive cybersecurity is a lot like trying to dodge bullets using a bullet proof vest, but as soon as you start using it hackers invent a new way to bypass the defenses. he said. It’s much easier to create new attacks than to adapt defenses. This is one of the reasons the public sees more emphasis on attacks like the case of the Russians during the election, and the biggest problem becomes keeping up with it.
In the ‘80s, computer viruses were created by hackers to show off, and malware mostly consisted of the hacker’s name flashing on the screen with dancing cockroaches or something similar, he said.
“Evil hackers aren’t making dancing cockroaches anymore,” he said. “They’re making things that make money.”