Richland College has been designated as a two-year National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAE2Y) for academic years 2011-2016. CAE2Ys receive formal recognition from the U.S. government, as well as opportunities for prestige and publicity for their role in securing our nation’s information systems.

Becoming a CAE2Y is a new opportunity for community colleges and represents an expansion of the program, previously established only for four-year schools. This institutional award was established by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, with the support of the National Science Foundation and CyberWatch. The goal of these programs is to reduce vulnerability in our national information infrastructure by promoting higher education and research in information assurance (IA) and producing a growing number of professionals with this expertise in various disciplines. CAE2Y schools have established a robust IA program, and have successfully mapped their security courses to two of the Committee on National Security Systems training standards.

In fall 2007, Richland College introduced a new associate degree in digital forensics, which includes a specialization in IA. This track focuses on the proper processing of stored and transmitted electronic data by identifying, detecting and applying the corrective measures in a timely manner to prevent data loss, unauthorized modification and destruction. IA is interdisciplinary and utilizes skills from multiple fields including accounting, forensic science, management, system engineering, security engineering, criminology and computer science. IA’s main focus is to identify and manage risk to assets while maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability to those assets.

For more information, please contact Zoltan Szabo, Professor of Digital Forensics, at 972-238-6059 or ZSzabo@dcccd.edu.