Pisces International

The Public Infrastructure Security Cyber Education System (PISCES) provides academic institutions with the curriculum, live data from public-sector community partners, and tools needed to enable students to gain practical experience in cyber analysis and enhance competitiveness in the demanding cybersecurity workforce. The PISCES curriculum introduces students to network and host security monitoring, security analysis practices, signature, reputation, anomaly-based threat detection, and threat intelligence while enhancing their skills in academic research, open-source intelligence, and reporting skills for security analysis. PISCES currently operates within 15 educational institutions across more than 25 public-sector data-sharing partners within Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, and Washington using the open-source Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana software to manage data in our analytic stack. Data collection devices with Suricata intrusion detection systems are deployed to community partner networks to stream metadata back to the analytic stack to supply academic partners with live data and alerts to analyze. Maintaining the data sharing network, infrastructure, curriculum, and continuing to develop support and administrative tools for instructors and students to access and analyze data are central to PISCES. Western Washington University (WWU) hosts the cyber analytic stack, support services and curricula while Critical Insight (CI) Security provides technical support to enable our mission.