Exploring Cybersecurity Excellence with Dr. Selwyn Ellis

Tom Stafford: 00:00:05

Hi, folks.

This is the Cyber Ways podcast and we translate our academic knowledge about information security into stuff that you can use as a security professional. We think it's a unique mission. We think you'll like it. I'm Tom Stafford.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:00:17

I'm Craig Van Slyke. Tom and I are your hosts on your journey to knowledge.

Cyber Ways is brought to you by the Louisiana Tech College of Business center for Information Assurance.

The center offers undergraduate and graduate certificate programs in cybersecurity and sponsors academic research focused on behavioral aspects of cybersecurity and information privacy.

Tom Stafford: 00:00:38

Welcome back to Cyberways. Tom Stafford, here with my colleague and associate, Craig Van Slyke and our guest today, Dr. Selwyn Ellis.

He's an expert on how to set up cybersecurity research centers certified by the US Government.

And we'd like to remind you that Cyber Ways is a production of the Louisiana Tech College of Business center for Information Assurance with assistance from the Just Business Grant, courtesy of Dean Chris Martin. With Dr. Ellis today, we're happy to have somebody who knows intimately how to get these cybersecurity centers certified.

And he's been doing this for decades, so he's very knowledgeable about how to set up these sorts of enterprises, particularly for the benefit of our external constituents.

Dr. Ellis is the Bosley Whitmore Endowed professor and head of the Department of Computer Information Systems in the College of Business at Louisiana Tech, and he directs the center for Information Assurance to provide as the institutional point of contact for the NSA's National Centers of Academic Excellence program, under which we're certified. Under his leadership, the University holds dual certifications.

We have the center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, and we have the center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research, Louisiana's only institution with both of these certifications and just one of 46 around the country with those dual certifications. And this affirms the program's rigor in cybersecurity teaching and scholarship.

Dr. Ellis is a longtime faculty member at Tech with dozens of peer reviewed publications, tons of citations, and he's best known for work on insider threats, privacy, and the dark triad in cybersecurity.

He holds the Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Mississippi College and the master's and doctoral degrees from Louisiana Tech. He's also actively involved in the telecommunications industry as a board member and a consultant. So, Selwyn, welcome to Cyberwaves.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:02:39

Thank you so much. Thanks, Craig, Tom, for having me.

I want to say first, thank you all for the work you do to produce this podcast and what it does for our center, but also for the, for industry in general. So thank you all for the work you do there.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:02:55

Thanks for joining us. Selwyn. So Tom mentioned Louisiana Tech's center for Information Assurance. What educational programs does the center offer?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:03:06

Well, so the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security started this program. Really, I think it was a call to the 911 attacks.

But so when in, in: 2009

But I think the key to this is we have an external group, like an accrediting group, but it's the federal government who looks at the courses we teach, the learning outcomes, the programs we have in place, and says, yes, this meets our criteria. Another couple of ideas. You know, we do have a mission. We do have some guidelines for operation. Education is extremely important.

But as I'm sure we'll talk about in a few minutes, research is a key component.

And as Tom mentioned earlier, we're the only university in the state and one of only a few nationwide who have dual designations in research and cybersecurity education.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:04:26

Yeah, that's quite an accomplishment. So is it every five years, every six years we have to be recertified?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:04:34

Yes, every five years, of course, we do an annual report, annual review. So they just look and see, hey, what are you doing? How are you?

They look at faculty members, they look at student outcomes, they look at funding from the university. But every five years, you have to get your program redesignated and what that is. It's a pretty intense.

It's not a true physical visit, but it is a visit on your program. And it's a lot of intense paperwork and review that's done to make sure you're doing what you say you're doing.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:05:10

That is an understatement. I've helped with a couple of these.

It is a massive amount of work where literally everything about our cybersecurity education programs, our research from what we do with undergrads all the way through what we do with PhD students, goes under a microscope. And it's multiple rounds of back and forth and clarification and questions about how we're meeting the goals of the programs.

I mean, it takes what, months easily, doesn't it?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:05:48

Yes.

And I think the coordination school university like Louisiana Tech, we have five different colleges, and when we have a review, it truly involves at least four of the colleges. It's not just the College of Business, which the College of Business does House our center, but it is almost university wide.

The data they want and looking at faculty, other programs, other research they're doing. So it's a university project.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:06:18

So it's not just the education programs, but it's the nature of research that gets done around the university as it relates to cyber. It's where our graduates go to work, where our doctoral students go to teach. It's really holistic, isn't it?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:06:34

Yes. And so to give you a little. So we have health informatics in one college. They look at healthcare and the information security concerns there.

The College of Education is involved because they do a lot of work with high school students and high school teachers trying to develop cybersecurity awareness programs. The College of Engineering has a PhD in Cybersecurity and undergraduate degrees in computer science and cyber engineering.

So their programs are looked at. So yes, it is a collection of data from literally the entire university.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:07:14

So I'm going to throw you what might be a little bit of a curveball and feel free to decline to answer. But why do all of this? It sounds like a lot of work. Why would you do it?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:07:23

Well, when we started doing it, it was one of those things. My colleague Tom Roberts approached me about it and said, let's look into this. And back then it was more, I think, the challenge.

And let's see, can we do it?

As we got into it though, there's so many grants and recognitions, even applications for certain programs that the university cannot apply for unless you hold this designation. So that's why the President and the dean and even other university leaders push us to do this, and that's why they're willing to fund it.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:08:01

Great, thanks, Tom.

Tom Stafford: 00:08:02

I'd like to shift gears for a moment and talk about the students who come out of our information assurance programs. Now, I note that we have several scholarship opportunities for students.

The Cyber Corps Scholarship for Service, the Department of Defense Cyber Service Academy. But also want to think about where these students go, the workplaces they're headed to.

I'm aware of a couple of the workplaces because I've done some research with, for example, General Dynamics, which typically is a classified workplace. But talk speak to the notion of the graduates out of this program and the value they take to industry with them.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:08:40

Well, thanks for bringing up the gdit situation.

We are an hour from Barksdale Air Force Base and back when President Bush was in office after 9 11, there was a lot of talk and we thought it was pretty certain that the cyber warfare unit would be housed at Barksdale. Well, as politics happened, it didn't get housed here. But that's what really instigated our thinking of we better be involved in this program.

But the value it brings to a company like gdit, they have, I mean, they make their living off of government contracts.

So when they hire their information security people they love, they've been through a program like theirs, like ours, and they're aware of so many stipulations that are in place.

As I say, when you're working on contracts dealing with the federal government, I dare say that the first six to 10 years, I bet you that 90% of our graduates went to work for GDIT, at least 75 plus percent.

Tom Stafford: 00:09:59

One of the things I learned when I was interacting with them over there is that cyber security is as important now as it ever was. Even if they don't have the, the Cyber Defense center there for the military because they're operating Nuclear Strike Command out of Barksdale.

And nation threat actors such as North Korea, Russia, China, Iran are always trying to hack in, as you would expect they would try.

And they do a substantial amount of work on essentially keeping the air base firewalled and protected, which I thought was a very important thing for our students to know about because they come in with a lot of expertise in telecom security, particularly in terms of the work that they would do for an employer like that.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:10:37

But I think these days we're not quite as focused on that one employer. We have students that go into local government, into commercial enterprises, transportation, supply chain, defense contractors.

It's pretty broad, isn't it?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:10:55

Yes. I didn't mean to imply that they dominate the student, the graduates, but they do, they're very interested in what we do.

We have students that work all over the state, even the nation. We had a graduate a few years ago, and I can't tell you how many years ago that had done an internship in the Washington, D.C. area.

And he went up and made an astronomical amount of money right out of school, close to $100,000 as a college graduate. And no other external or additional education except for the cybersecurity certificate.

And it's very valuable to employers, no matter what segment you're in.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:11:36

Let me ask a little bit of a related question. So we've talked about how much work it is to get and to maintain the center for Academic Excellence designations.

So what does that mean for employers? So do we have to make sure that our curriculum aligns with something from the NSA and Homeland Security? How does that work?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:12:01

Yes, as most people aware, especially your listeners will Be aware there are a lot of industry certificates in cybersecurity. And so those are industry standard certificates.

The difference is this standard certificate of certification program is looked at and approved by the federal government.

So there's almost like a dual role where a lot of our graduates, and I keep in touch with most of them, but they have some type of security plus or some other additional industry cert. But this is a different look, a different side of what they're doing. So it does bring value to employers.

It brings a lot of value to a career for an individual who seeks this certification.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:12:50

I guess that's the bottom line on it, is that if, whether it's our program or some other center for Academic Excellence program, employers can be pretty sure that the students who come out of those programs are going to be well educated with pretty deep expertise in some particular aspect of cybersecurity. I think that that's the bottom line, right?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:13:14

And not to pick on individuals. It's not fair to do that.

But you can look at almost any university, even community college, any other advanced education institution, they're going to have some type of cybersecurity emphasis, probably somewhere in their course catalogs. But what this says is we meet standards that they don't necessarily have to live up to, and the standards are what's important.

It gives us a measuring stick.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:13:50

Like.

Tom Stafford: 00:13:50

To shift gears a little bit if I could, and talk about the, the faculty who are guiding these students. You know, we, we teach a lot of students, they go take important security jobs.

But tell us a little about how the faculty have to prepare in order to be the kind of mentor that a center of academic excellence would, would turn out.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:14:08

Well, the two of you helped me a lot. You know, the two of you help with PhD students. Also. I'll hit on Jake Lee. Dr. Jae Yong Lee is our security guy.

He came from Buffalo and he teaches the majority, at least past the little over the majority of classes in the information security certificate. Now we are trying to hire someone to help alleviate some of that load. But Jake's extremely qualified. He is a security expert.

He's well published, he's well known in the security community, respected by his peers and the students really love Jake.

Then we have Don Ryder, who has a PhD, is not truly a research faculty, but as far as teaching and as far as a security and network guy, he's very well respected, has a consulting business around the Shreveport, Bossier area that he does well in. He helps with a class or two there. And I fill in where I can to help with the disaster recovery class. But our faculty, I give you all credit for it.

As far as across campus, we have several guys from the computer science department. That helps as far as, say, getting student groups together to compete in national and regional events.

And they lead their PhD students to do research in this area, which helps us with our CAE research designation.

Tom Stafford: 00:15:48

I'd like to interject that most of our doctoral students are going out as security experts as well. The typical dissertation topic has. Has something to do with information assurance or cyber defense, or even user behavior in a secure workplace.

But another factor of our center of academic excellence is we now have the capability to run neurocognitive studies. If we wanted to do a study on what people were alarmed at about a security threat, we can do that in our research suite.

Artificial intelligence, as I've learned from my colleagues at gdit, is also rising very quickly as an aspect of cyber defense, as they say, over General Dynamics. Typically, the. The threats are being engineered by AI, and so you have to use AI to defend. And, and Dr. Van Slyke is our. Our AI expert.

Maybe I should pass the ball to him on that one.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:16:44

I think you're right. It. Sorry. Go ahead, Selma.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:16:48

No, I was going to say. I'm sorry to interrupt that we.

When Tom said that without our PhD students and without the two of you and Jake directing their studies in security, at least most of them, there's no way we could even have the CAE research designation. So what Tom brought up there is extremely important to the designation programs.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:17:12

Well, we focus a lot on the behavioral aspects of cybersecurity. So I know our colleagues across campus in computer science and engineering. Cyber engineering focus more on some of the technical aspects. But here's.

And Tom and Selwyn, jump in if I forget anything, but just in the last couple of years we've had papers published or had dissertations done on cyber complacency, the role of various emotions in cyber behaviors, security workarounds, especially related to security policy violations, personality. Selwyn, you and I have a pretty well received paper on the dark triad and cyber sabotage.

Tom, you've been pretty heavily involved with looking at the economic impacts of cybersecurity breaches, extra role security behaviors, how training affects policy compliance, and the list goes on and on and on. So pretty much anything related to behavioral aspects would kind of fall into our wheelhouse. Would you agree?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:18:17

Yes, but your guidance, the two of you in seminars and Jake. But the guidance and getting students to think in that direction.

That's why these students are going out and they're able to direct other students in learning activities and research in this area.

Because otherwise, like I say, before the two of you came on board and Jake, we had a program, but we did very little, if any, with our graduate students in cybersecurity.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:18:48

I want to take kind of a step back because it just occurred to me that we have not talked about the curriculum much. So, Selwyn, can you give us a rundown of what courses, what students might learn in our certificate programs?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:19:06

I'm not sure if you can.

If they Google Louisiana Tech center of Academic Excellence center for Information Assurance, they could find a hard copy or something to look at there, but I'll go through. We do require or at least require knowledge, I don't want to say a class, but a knowledge of network networking before they start the program.

Then we have an information assurance, basically a principles course. We have a disaster recovery business continuity course, we have a risk analysis course, and then we also have a forensics course.

And so it's really only five or four courses. You get credit for five subject areas. But in those courses, as I said, we map it back to all of the learning outcomes that the, the NSA requires.

And of course, you know, a lot of people would say, well, how do you do it in four courses? Well, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of material to be covered. How about that?

It's a lot of material, a lot of exposure, and that's why a lot of people haven't done this, because it does make you stay very focused on the content to get them an exposure to all those areas.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:20:23

And that's the graduate program that you were speaking of, right?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:20:26

That's right. That's right.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:20:28

So the undergraduate has, let's see, six required courses, five required courses, very similar.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:20:36

It's just the networking course is required because that's our undergraduate course in networking. Yes.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:20:43

And especially for the undergraduate course that's going to be within a broader curriculum. That might be information systems, it might be accounting, it might be cyber engineering or computer science. And so that's just the focus area.

Right, okay.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:21:01

And, and with all those, as I said, it's, it's a, it's, it's a mapping back to the, the knowledge you should have so that anybody that walks into a security type job should be at least qualified, if not an expert, at least qualified to be in that type of role. And I'm proud of the way our students performed and they performed in their careers also. And we have a pretty good product.

Tom Stafford: 00:21:36

I Just wanted to insert a guiding question.

We have a robust relationship with our accounting department and have learned along the way that there is a substantial amount of information assurance work that is done in the accounting profession, particularly in auditing. But a number of our students have looked at things like fraud detection as an extension of our cybersecurity focus.

So for the employers out there who are listening, they probably would find great value in our students who know how to protect internal information assets on the books, as it were, because many of them have an orientation towards protecting corporate information.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:22:14

I agree. And I think if any accountant, cpa, that requires any type of continuing education, a program like this would be very beneficial to them.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:22:25

I think would give them a competitive advantage, for sure. So let's broaden out. Let's zoom out a little bit.

We've been talking particularly about our programs at Louisiana Tech and the NSA center for Academic Excellence programs, but we're in kind of a turbulent time for higher ed, including cybersecurity education, in part because of AI and for other reasons. So let's speculate. Selwyn, what do you think cybersecurity education is going to look like in the next, I don't know, five or ten years?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:23:02

Well, the, the words, the content that I think of, the topic I think of, and Tom mentioned earlier, is AI.

So the National Security Agency, last fall at our annual meeting, they announced that they would have two new programs of designation or studies centers of designation, one on security and artificial intelligence and one in artificial intelligence and security.

So the difference between those two, one, they're worried about how we're protecting the AI, the programs, the software that's written out there, how we're incorporating AI into that. But the one that we would be concerned about, or I think is most relevant to us, is how AI is being used in the security industry or in the.

In everyday security operations. So our president has hinted that he wants us to look at a program there.

But I think that's the biggest change that's going to happen in AI, sorry, in cyber security education is how AI is going to affect it.

I don't have the answers, but I think it's extremely interesting to think about and study and throw away or throw around ideas of what that's going to do as a learning tool, as helping with, as both of you mentioned earlier, the social engineering aspect, the generation of phishing emails. It's going to be interesting.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:24:31

Yeah. I mean, Tom brought that up earlier. The AI as an tack vector and then AI as a defense device.

You mentioned social engineering I'm way speculating here, but I think that's where we're going to see a lot of AI's influence, especially in the kind of programs that we have. We're already seeing, like you mentioned, phishing attacks, other kinds of social engineering attacks getting much more sophisticated because of AI.

You can't just look at the language and identify something as a phishing attack anymore. But I think there's a lot of opportunity to look at social engineering resilience, especially with more line oriented employees. So I don't know.

What do you think about that, Tom? Feel free to jump in. I'm sure you've thought about this.

Tom Stafford: 00:25:30

The social engineering aspect of it is clear in my mind.

When Kevin Mitnick, who passed away recently, major cybersecurity consultant to the FBI after having been, he basically did a plea deal because he was essentially one of the threat actors who broke into phone systems and stuff like that, got caught, agreed to reduce his sentence by being an advisor to him. Saw him speak at the Monroe Civic Center a few years ago and he said he doesn't do much brute force intrusion.

He's typically looking for sticky notes or using an RFID reader to get somebody's passcode on their other employee badge. It's. It's all a matter of being tricky, I guess. But that could be changing in the coming future of computing.

I've read a lot that quantum technology is going to change the nature of how we secure computers and how we protect our information as well.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:26:26

Well, it's a little scary about how easy it is to put together a profile of somebody that can be used for social engineering. Just for fun, I wanted to see what sort of bio ChatGPT would write about Dr. Ellis.

It was shockingly accurate and well written and took about, I don't know, a minute to do. It was a nice little test because I would have known whether or not it was hallucinating.

But now we can scrape social media, LinkedIn, whatever it might be, company websites. It's just so easy to scrape that sort of thing and use AI to come up with a very convincing attack.

I think one of the things we're going to need to do as educators is to make students more aware of that and help them understand how we might be able to defend against those kinds of attacks because they are scary and hard.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:27:25

This is a stretch, but I think about how the AI generated videos and voice messages can come and I think now how easily you could create a video of a leader, in our case a president of the university or a CEO or of a group and ask them to do whatever. And I mean that's very simple to do and very simple in nature.

But the more we've got to make people aware that really check the validity of these and where they come from and to make sure we don't fall for those type of things. I've seen some self generated or some AI generated videos recently that are just outs. I mean they're amazing and.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:28:11

Deep fake audio is really easy to do, so.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:28:14

Easy. Yes.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:28:15

But the video, you know, somebody that knows what they're doing can do that pretty well. What about more hands on and experiential learning?

You know, we've got a little bit of a problem in higher ed because of AI and the ability to use AI inappropriately for students. Do you think that's going to push us to more hands on and experiential ways of teaching cybersecurity?

Selwyn Ellis: 00:28:43

It should. If it doesn't, it should. I mean, yes, it's obvious that that's the direction we should be heading. I think the one I don't say.

Well, it's a little bit of a struggle and it's when you have programs that are online, it's easy and it's a lot easier in a controlled environment, in a control lab to have that more experiential, like I say, controlled environment. But yes, that's the direction we should be going for certain.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:29:11

I, I just read that blue book sales, those blue essay books that we used to use back in the day, sales are up somewhere between 50 and 80% after ChatGPT. I think Tom was accounted for a big chunk of that, but.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:29:26

And it's going to get worse though. Yeah, and that's, that's what we deal with, the three of us deal with all the time.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:29:33

I want to throw out one more thing before we wrap up and that's the talent pipeline.

So I have some pretty significant concerns that AI is going to maybe cut off some of the entry level work broadly, but also in cybersecurity because the things that AI can do are closer to the things that entry level employees can do than it is to experienced employees. And I have some real worries that we might cut off that entry point into the cybersecurity profession.

If you had any thoughts on that, Tom, you're looking at this at a higher level than I am as a department chair. And Tom, I know you've got your feet in a bunch of different or your hands in a bunch of different.

So I'd love to hear what both of you think about that problem.

Tom Stafford: 00:30:28

My son has a computer science degree and he was programming in C Sharp for Epic Systems, a major electronic medical records company.

He basically resigned to go back to school and learn, take a master's degree in AI because he sees a future where entry level programming won't be done by people anymore, but that the people who are in programming will need to be able to supervise. Let's call them the entry level agents, the AIs that'll be doing the basic coding. In terms of cybersecurity.

Gee, that's, that's a difficult one to, to parse out. The social engineering thing we've already covered, I, I tend to think in terms of the anti malware and antivirus software that I use.

That agentic assistance reminding me to update my process files, reminding me to scan my computer might be one thing that will come about. But I'm really fascinated by what the likely future of user protections will be when we reach the point where passwords can easily be cracked.

It's, it is scary, but we always find a way to accommodate.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:31:33

So I want to. My take on this is okay, how about I do understand Craig's concern, but also look at it at more of a micro level or people that I'm involved with.

Our students. Recently one of our undergrads was placed at a good friend of mine's local company, oil field company, an oil, oil and gas company.

And he is, he's really only about halftime cyber security. But the problem is last Thanksgiving over the Christmas holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas holidays, his company got malware.

And because of that one instance, he's more concerned about cyber security than he is almost anything else as far as his systems world.

And he likes the fact that this kid has, this student has an awareness and a training in that area, but yet he has a, a systems approach to helping his business be operating efficiently. So, you know, I do understand Craig's concern also.

Everything I read tells me that there are going to be more cybersecurity jobs than almost anything else. Of course, I know AI will overtake that in the next few years, more than likely.

But I can't say that there's not going to be maybe a blended, a blended AI, cybersecurity type, entry level person. And that's probably why the NSA is going toward that new security designation.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:33:08

Yep. And we hope to be on the leading edge of that.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:33:10

Let's get there with them. Yes.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:33:12

Great.

Tom Stafford: 00:33:13

So, and that leads me to the question I wanted to pose to you as we wrap up, which is the advice you would have for folks in industry who want to partner with universities like ours who work on and train in cybersecurity security in terms of preparing the future workforce of cyber defense, if you will.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:33:33

Well, first, we are always looking for internships. We're always looking for any kind of support with our, the execution of our programs. The students have jobs. We, we place our students.

And of course like in most programs, the really good students gets wrapped up. It gets snatched up pretty quickly. But yeah, if anybody has a desire to approach us and be a part of it, we'd love to have them.

We always have needs, like I say, for interns, but we also have needs for just say projects to work on if they would be open to some type of research project for our PhD students. Now that gets a little hairy sometime, but if there's a project they would like for us to work on, we'd be happy to be involved in that also.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:34:23

Well, and for the listeners who are outside of the region, which is most of our listeners, I can pretty confidently say that your local university would probably love to have you involved. The easiest way to do it is to act as a guest speaker. That's a really simple kind of low time cost way.

And our students love to hear from people that are out there in industry. We love to make the connections and I'm speaking we broadly not just Louisiana Tech University.

So I would really encourage listeners to reach out to their alma maters or to schools in their region and find a way to get involved. That's really what's going to help us maintain a strong pipeline into the cyber defense area.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:35:11

We would always entertain the fact of having you virtually or come to campus. If your school does not have that opportunity, we'd be happy to give it to you.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:35:20

Absolutely. All right, Tom, you want to take us out?

Tom Stafford: 00:35:23

This has been Cyberways.

It's a podcast production of the Louisiana Tech College of Business center for Information Assurance, a DHS NSA certified center for academic excellence. As we've been talking about, find this wherever podcasts are sold and do tell your friends about it too.

Thanks to Dean Chris Martin for the Just Business grant that supports our operations. And thank you for being here with us today, Dr. Ellis.

Selwyn Ellis: 00:35:49

Thank you.

Tom Stafford: 00:35:50

And it is important to say that the Cyberways Podcast is funded through the Just Business Grant program of the Louisiana Tech College of Business and we're grateful for that.

Craig Van Slyke: 00:36:00

So join us next time on the Cyberways Podcast, which is available on all major podcast platforms. We want you to subscribe or follow or whatever button your favorite podcast app has. Thank you very much, Sam.