In his keynote speech “On Transparency in the Shadowy World of Cyberattacks” at Fordham’s 2022 International Conference on Cyber Security on July 19, Walker recalled a dangerous series of cyberattacks that targeted Google more than a decade ago and the company’s major takeaways from the incident. 

In 2009, Google was the victim of a massive cyberattack called Operation Aurora. In a widespread phishing campaign, a group of hackers from China tried to steal trade secrets from more than two dozen high-profile companies, including Adobe, Morgan Stanley, and Google. The hackers breached company networks and succeeded in stealing intellectual property. 

Many companies decided not to publicize the attack, but Google chose to do the opposite—and for good reason, said Walker, who previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in addition to starting one of the first “computer crime” units in the country. 

“[When I was a federal prosecutor who specialized in technology crime], one of the big challenges we encountered was getting companies to go public or even go to the authorities … Because of that, we felt it was important to talk about the attack [at Google]—to tell the world about its impact, about the methods that the attackers were using,” Walker said. “That’s not always comfortable work. We’ve had some tough conversations with partners and our own teams about disclosing vulnerabilities. … But it’s necessary to move the industry forward and to make sure that bugs are being fixed quickly before they can be exploited.” 

One of the biggest takeaways from the incident was the necessity of transparency about their work, he said. The cybersecurity community, law enforcement, and the public need to share vulnerabilities and cyberattacks with each other in order to raise security worldwide, he said. 

The second and perhaps even more important lesson from the cyberattack was learning what worked and didn’t work in cybersecurity architecture, said Walker. It’s important to focus on the fundamentals of software security to raise general security and to not only rely on threat intelligence and security products to protect users, but to develop secure products with built-in security features, rather than “built-on.” 

“Aurora showed us and everyone in the industry that we were doing cybersecurity wrong,” Walker said. “We were building high walls to keep the bad actors out. But if they got past those walls, they got wide internal access. The attack helped us recognize that we had to double down on security by design.”

After the cyberattack, the company launched BeyondCorp, an internal initiative that pioneered the concept of Zero Trust—a security framework that has taken off across the industry, he said.

“It lets every employee work from untrusted networks without the [need for a traditional VPN],” Walker said. “They can access the most sensitive internal services and data over the Internet without sacrificing security.” 

Cyberthreats are growing stronger, but cybersecurity tools are also getting better, said Walker. He highlighted artificial intelligence, which allows experts to see threats faster and reduces human error, as well as other tools like advanced cryptography and quantum computing. 

Google has shared many of its advances with other organizations and governments—now it’s time for the cybersecurity community as a whole to get better at sharing its knowledge across the national security community, academia, and Silicon Valley, he said. 

“It’s not a time for holding successful techniques to ourselves,” Walker said. “Cybersecurity is a team sport.”

The Signal Flame: A Novel

In his first novel, The Sojourn (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011), Andrew Krivák told the story of Jozef Vinich, a sharpshooter in the Austro-Hungarian Army who survives World War I and immigrates to America with $50 in his pocket. He settles in northeastern Pennsylvania, rises from yard worker to co-owner of a roughing mill, and acquires 2,000 acres of land on which he builds a large home for his wife and children. But he and his descendants are a “war-haunted family in a war-torn century.” The Signal Flame, set in 1972, begins with Vinich’s death. As his daughter Hannah and grandson Bo mourn, they grapple with the news that Bo’s younger brother, Sam, who joined the Marines, has been reported as missing in action in Vietnam. They also grapple with the legacy of Sam and Bo’s father, who came home from World War II a silent, damaged man and was later killed in a hunting accident. “What they shared were the wars,” Krivák writes in a lyrical prologue to a lyrical, moving novel on the meaning of love, loss, and loyalty.

The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History by Susan Cahill, GSAS ’95 (St. Martin’s Press)

Susan Cahill first visited the City of Light during the 1960s, on her honeymoon with her husband, the writer Thomas Cahill, FCRH ’64. It’s a place, she writes, where “the streets are stories.” She takes readers through them in this travel guide, following the lives of 22 famous Parisians from the 12th century to the present. She writes about “The Scandalous Love of Héloise and Abelard,” “The Lonely Passion of Marie Curie,” and “Raising Hell in Pigalle,” where the “scruffy streets of the ninth were François Truffaut’s muse and mother.” Each chapter includes a lively cultural history, plus information about nearby attractions. The result is an engaging guide for travelers drawn to stories that, Cahill writes, “do not show up on historical plaques or in the voice-overs of flag-waving tour guides.”

Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break by Rachael O’Meara, GABELLI ’04, (Tarcher Perigee)

Six years ago, Rachael O’Meara was a customer support manager at Google. The job made her “the envy of all my friends,” she writes, but she was burning out fast, feeling overwhelmed, unfulfilled, and unable to find the off switch. Her work and well-being suffered. Eventually, with support from her boss, she took a 90-day unpaid leave and returned to the company in a new role, with a healthier outlook. In this book, she shares her story and stories of others who have discovered that a pause, even a “forced pause” like getting laid off, can lead to a more fulfilling life. She offers tips for creating a daily “pause plan.” It can be as simple as a five-minute walk or a day unplugged from digital devices, she writes, but the benefits are priceless: greater “mental clarity” and “a chance to remember what ‘lights you up.’”

But there’s a catch, say students at the Gabelli School of Business: No matter how safe they are, driverless cars cannot be truly accident-free.

And in the event of a serious accident, whom should the car be programmed to save?

Sponsored by the business school and the Center for Ethics Education, the case competition tasked 12 teams of undergraduates with analyzing a real-world ethical dilemma and devising a solution that was legal, financially sound, and ethical.

Self-driving cars and passenger safety: An ethical dilemma

“Hardwiring Ethics” undertook the difficult task of finding such a way for Google and other driverless car manufacturers to anticipate these potentially life-or-death decisions.

“Today, in the moments when an accident is happening, we react based on instinct. But instinct isn’t something the self-driving car will have,” said Garlick, an applied accounting and finance major.

“In 99 out of 100 cases, the self-driving car should be able to see a kid that runs out into the road ahead of time and react accordingly. But in that 1-in-100 chance that the car can’t avoid an accident, it’s going to have to make a decision about who it will protect and who it won’t.”

These implications are enormous, Garlick said. Should Google primarily protect the passengers in the car at the expense of pedestrians or other drivers? Should the car prioritize the safety of children in the car, or should all parties be weighted equally?

The team reasoned that because the cars are allegedly safer than human-driven cars, Google has to first make sure that people actually buy the cars, which could be on the market as soon as 2017. Programming the cars to prioritize passenger safety—as opposed to anyone outside the car—will create consumers’ trust, which has so far been Google’s main marketing challenge.

Once these cars are the norm, it will become general knowledge that, in the unlikely event of accident, the car will protect its passengers first and foremost. And if the public understands that a driverless car may not stop if it does not see a pedestrian in time, pedestrians will take greater care when they are near roadways, Garlick said.

The team also found legal precedent for this utilitarian (“greatest good for the greatest number”) argument via a 1980s case that placed a limited liability on vaccine manufacturers. According to the ruling, even though some people may have adverse reactions to vaccines, the societal benefit of vaccines outweighs the potential harm done to that small number of individuals.

“This doesn’t mean that the vaccine manufacturer couldn’t be sued if they were negligent,” Garlick explained. “But if, for instance, the vaccine protected one million people but one person died as a result of being vaccinated, the manufacturer could not be sued for that one death. The idea for Google would be to get similar protection.”

Ethics and social responsibility in business

In addition to offering students the chance to undertake rigorous research, the competition complements Fordham’s mission to instill in business students a sense of social responsibility, said faculty moderator Miguel Alzola, PhD, assistant professor of law and ethics.

“The goal of business school is to teach students to be good decision-makers in any area of business they go into,” Alzola said. “Being a good decision-maker is not just about having good technical skills, but about understanding your professional and social responsibility when your decisions have an impact on millions of people.”

Garlick, Schmitz, Cinkova, and Teske will face off next week with undergraduate and graduate students from around the world at IBECC. The third annual competition aims to teach students that it is possible to both act ethically and do business profitably.

“They have a fascinating topic and an excellent presentation,” Alzola said about the “Hardwiring Ethics” team. “I am very enthusiastic about their prospects in the international competition.”

Try doing it in less than 10 hours.

That’s what Fordham student Trevor Haskell did, earning kudos from the folks at Google.

Haskell, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, walked away from the 2014 Google Scholars Conference with a People’s Choice Award for an application he and three teammates produced. The team created an app—one compatible with Android phones, iPhones, and the Web—that produces cypher challenges for middle school students.

“A classic example of a cypher is the encrypted phrase where every letter takes the place of the letter after it—‘A’ becomes ‘B,’ ‘B’ becomes ‘C,’ and so on. [Using this code, the word ‘dog’ would become ‘eph’],” says Haskell, a computer science major. “In the app, the idea is for the students to decode the cypher as fast as possible.”

Haskell and his team created the app as part of the conference’s two-day “hackathon,” an event in which computer programmers and software developers collaborate intensely on software projects. Fifteen teams were given 10 hours to build an app that could pique K-12 students’ interest in computer science. They then had to present their creation to a panel of judges.

“The reason it’s called a hackathon is because you’re hacking things together,” says Haskell, a native of Salt Point, New York. “Ten hours is a very short amount of time. If you take too long or try to make it perfect, you won’t finish in time. But you still have to make sure the code is clean and that everything works.

“It’s a lot of fun, even though it’s stressful. You’re learning as you go—Googling for answers, working with other people. And at the end, you’ve made something.”

A recipient of Google’s Lime Connect Scholarship, Haskell was one of 68 students from around the United States and Canada invited to the conference, which was held in June at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. In addition to participating in the hackathon, the scholars toured Google’s offices and learned about outreach projects to help draw younger students to the field of computer science.

With an eye toward working in information network security after college, Haskell is gaining experience in that field at Fordham. He is a teaching assistant in Fordham’s new master’s program in cybersecurity and he is maintaining the Linux servers and the website for the International Conference on Cyber Security, which is hosted by Fordham University and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in January.

Rachel Buttner contributed to this article.

“This is an exciting and forward looking step for Fordham,” said Frank J. Sirianni, Ph.D., vice president and chief information officer. “The trend to Cloud computing, and in particular cloud email is very modern and continues to grow, and Fordham will grow along with it.”

Faculty and staff can get information throughout this transition on the employee tab at the new portal channel, All Things Gmail! Regular communications from Fordham IT will be shared with the community via email, web, iTV, meetings and events.

“We are focused on supporting the individual and providing complete support to meet each community member’s needs during this transition,” said Sirianni. “To that end, we are planning for a robust communications and training plan for this migration to the new email platform.”

Over the last year, Fordham IT consulted with many faculty and staff members via focus groups, surveys and meetings as well as with the Senate Technology Committee to understand everyone’s requirements for a new messaging platform. This collaboration yielded the consistent request for a stable, quality platform that can use email, contacts and calendars anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Google’s Apps for Higher Education is the most popular cloud email platform for faculty and staff deployed at leading universities including Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, New York University and University of San Francisco. It is also the email provider of choice for over 90,000 employees of the United States Government.

Sirianni noted that Google has set the trend in communications and collaboration leader with other major providers rushing to create similar offerings. Some of the many benefits of Google Gmail include the seamless provisioning of upgrades and continual improvement of the offering and services.  This transition will put the University on a single messaging platform for all students, faculty, staff and alumni for the first time in Fordham’s modern history.

Thanks to the community for helping to make the best decision for the University.

Carlucci said adopting Gmail was an important step in providing a more robust environment for collaboration and unified communications for Fordham students, and allows the University to accomplish its longstanding goal of providing “e-mail for life” to students, who will retain their Fordham addresses as alumni.

Last summer Fordham IT created a task force which outlined a series of requirements for a new student e-mail system. In addition to being cost-effective, it needed to provide reliable access, expanded storage, a feature-rich Web-based interface, access from mobile devices, and robust e-mail attachment support. A survey of peer institutions confirmed what we had already learned from our students–Gmail was the best choice for our enterprise.

The first phase of this implementation is limited to providing mail, calendar and contacts to current students, and to the graduating classes of 2009 and 2010.  Students will continue to access their e-mail in the Fordham portal (my.fordham.edu) using their AccessIT ID and password.  They will also have the option of accessing their Gmail from mobile devices and desktop e-mail programs.

IT’s next steps are to develop plans for providing e-mail accounts to all alumni, and to begin the review of other Google applications, such as Google Docs, etc.

Sickles, who earned an MBA from Northwestern University after graduating from Fordham with a degree in marketing and management, will speak at 9:30 a.m. in the McGinley Center Ballroom.

In his current position, he is responsible for developing Google’s global relationships with a select group of consumer product’s companies. Previously, he spent three years as head of healthcare at Google, focused on providing solutions for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and a year in sales management with Google Audio.

After Sickles’ talk, Frank Werner, Ph.D., associate professor of finance and economics will review the students’ summer reading assignment, The Google Story (Delacorte Press, 2005). The students then will break into groups to discuss potential business proposals.

—Patrick Verel