

There are so many different areas of offensive security and so many different types of assessments that you can do. The goal of someone doing offensive security is to find problems before someone else can do something malicious with those problems. So can you just explain what offensive security is, and what maybe, what are some of the things that a person like yourself, a researcher, would look at or try to study? For my Ph.D., it’s a little bit more networking based, working with networking protocols, understanding how things work, stuff like that. Offensive security has always been one of the most interesting things to me so that’s one of my big research areas I’ve been focusing on. That is the primary thing that I did at the DoD. One of my primary areas is offensive security. What kinds of things are you currently looking at or researching? I’m still working at finishing up my doctoral degree. And then after a couple of years at DoD, came back as a faculty member now at DSU. I started my doctoral program immediately after that, but I also went full time into the Department of Defense (DoD). So I started in 2011, and I graduated with my bachelor’s in 2014, and then I graduated with my master’s in 2016. I ended up coming down to Dakota State University as a freshman in 2011. But basically what happened was the instructor of that course had a couple of students who had already come down to Dakota State University, and said they’d liked it and things were going great. The way the course was laid out, it was designed to be kind of a CCNA bootcamp. When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to take a special networking class, it was based around Cisco networking. How did you first become interested in cybersecurity and what did your early career look like? The university is recognized as a National Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, Information Assurance Research, Cyber Operations, and most recently as a Cyber Defense Regional Resource Center. Tyler Flaagan is an instructor of computer and security sciences at Dakota State University.


CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+).Certified Information Security Manager (CISM).Certified Information Security Systems Professional (CISSP).Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA).
