Students are shutting down the worst of the web in this UAB lab

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rep laura mclester 550pxLaura McLester graduated from the master's program in cyber security this spring and landed a coveted job at LinkedIn. She credits her time in UAB's Computer Forensics Research Lab with giving her the skills she needed to make her resume stand out. “Whenever you’re starting out in a field, you have that same Catch 22 — you need experience to get hired, but how do you get that experience in the first place?" McLester said. "The lab fills that gap.”Laura McLester used to build trust and bring safety to distraught patients in hospital rooms. Now she does the same thing for the half-billion or so users of professional networking site LinkedIn — while working from home.

It’s a career transformation that McLester says she owes to her time in another location: UAB’s Computer Forensics Research Lab. During her two years in the lab, McLester learned to combine the analysis skills she had developed as a social worker with the programming and criminal justice training she received in UAB’s Master of Science in Cyber Security program — and apply them to dozens of real-life cases on behalf of banks, government agencies and other clients. Even better, for someone who left full-time employment to go back to school: she got paid to do it.

 

Social worker to cybercrime fighter

“I was a hospital social worker in Birmingham, and I loved it, but for family reasons I needed a career change to something with flexible hours,” McLester said. At the same time, a friend who did work in open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigations told her about some of his cases. “I didn’t know that was a thing, but I took an online class and fell in love with it,” she said. She started attending meetings of the Birmingham chapter of InfraGard, a group that brings FBI agents and private sector technologists together to take on digital crime. “That’s where I found out about UAB’s master’s program,” McLester said. “That was in mid-November and by January I was in my first semester.”

“We’re one of the few programs in the country that really likes social science people,” said Jeffery Walker, Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Criminal Justice. Walker is co-director of the Master of Science in Cyber Security program and the graduate-level certificate program in Computer Forensics. “Any time you are talking about digital forensics or cybercrime, you have to remember that there is someone on the other end of the computer. If you leave out the psychology and the social aspects of it all, you are missing a critical factor.”

This is a good time to specialize in digital security. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that there are 300,000 cybersecurity jobs needing to be filled.

The master’s program and the bachelor’s degree in Digital Forensics are offered jointly with the Department of Computer Science. “We get a lot of undergraduate computer science students coming straight in, but we also have people with backgrounds in political science, foreign languages and our physical forensics program looking to increase their skillsets,” Walker said. “The cybersecurity folks are the castle walls, looking to protect the environment; then there are the reaction and analysis people. You need them both.”

Especially when you have a long list of clients with digital problems to solve. Nearly 100 students (undergraduates and graduate students) work in the lab under the direction of Walker; Gary Warner, UAB’s director of research in computer forensics; and a lab manager. Their clients include Facebook, local and national law-enforcement agencies, banks and other financial institutions. “We do a tremendous amount of work for banks — analyzing malware and viruses to figure out who is committing fraud — but we also do a tremendous amount with agencies fighting terrorist threats,” Walker said. “If you only have analysts and no programmers, you’re just reading the newspaper. But if you only have programmers and no analysts, you’ll never understand the people behind the crimes. Whether you’re into programming or into people, you will come out of your time in the lab with some really strong skills.”

 

rep cfrl 1000pxStudents work cases on a slow afternoon in the Computer Forensics Research Lab. The map in the background notes the employers of alumni, including Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, NASA, IBM, Regions and Wells Fargo.

 

A day in the life

A typical case might involve investigating a digital check-cashing scam, in which a criminal solicits participants willing to deposit a check to their bank account online. Before the bank has time to realize the check is worthless, “they drive to an ATM and take out $400,” Walker explained. “You keep half and the guy who gave you the check keeps half. That may not sound like much, but if you’re doing that with a thousand people, it runs into real money.” It’s not unheard of for a criminal running this scam to make a million dollars a month, Walker noted.

To stop these criminals, “you have to go after the network,” Walker said. That’s why banks turn to UAB. Lab teams first figure out exactly how a scam is operating. Then they use specialized searching software to dig through the open Internet to uncover the network behind the crime. The scammers and the bank account owners that abet them are often connected in some way — friends of friends, say — and patient casework can reveal these links. “We do link analysis to figure out who is friends with whom,” Walker said.

 

3 steps to a successful cybercrime career

Alumna Laura McLester shares some of the advice she gives new students in UAB’s digital forensics and cybercrime programs.

1) Take whatever you’re offered and run with it. “Even if you don’t know if you’re interested, jump at the opportunities that will come your way. Whenever you are offered a project, do it well and thoroughly and that alone will make you shine. And if you aren’t offered something, look for a gap and see how you can fill it.”

And recognize that work doesn’t just happen in front of a computer, she added. “If someone says, ‘We’re getting coffee, do you want to come along?’ the answer is ‘yes.’ Relationships are important in any career and that’s no different for cybersecurity. Some of the most valuable things you will learn come when you’re walking to Starbucks.”

2) Don’t move too fast, though. “Students can come in saying, ‘I only want to consider law enforcement,’ but I tell them, ‘don’t get so deep that you don’t get exposure to other pathways. Consider government and industry. You never know what opportunities may come.’” In the same way, she cautions new students against racing through their degrees. “Everyone wants to get out and get a job, but if all you have is a degree you just get added to a stack of people who have done the same thing. I recommend that people space out their classes so they have time to work in the lab, or in the camps that the lab hosts in the summer for high school students, or take on a different minor that gives you an interesting combination of skills.”

3) If you can get into the Computer Forensics Research Lab, do it. “It is such a game-changer. The degree program is huge by itself, but if you add experience in the lab you are so hireable. It’s a really unique experience that we have here at UAB.”

 

Asking the right questions

Although social work may sound a long way from fighting crime, “I don’t think it’s that big of a jump,” McLester said. “I find myself using a lot of my social-work thinking skills and approaches for cases. When I was a social worker I would walk into a patient room and listen and then have to identify — ‘What are they telling me and what are they not telling me and how do I find out what I need to know?’ In forensics you are handed data and you immediately have to ask the same questions: ‘What is this data telling me and what are the gaps I need to fill in?’”

Jeffery Walker and Laura McLesterJeffery Walker and Laura McLester
“We’re one of the few programs in the country that really likes social science people," Walker said. "Any time you are talking about digital forensics or cybercrime, you have to remember that there is someone on the other end of the computer. If you leave out the psychology and the social aspects of it all, you are missing a critical factor.”

Soon after she joined the program, McLester started “hanging out” in the lab, she said. “After a few months, Gary [Warner] said, ‘Do you want a job?’” She immediately said yes. “Gary is a tremendous resource for students and I’m a huge fan of the lab,” McLester said. “We work real cases with real clients, getting phenomenal hands-on experience. Whenever you’re starting out in a field, you have that same Catch 22 — you need experience to get hired, but how do you get that experience in the first place? The lab fills that gap. You get exposure to almost all the cybercrime topics — phishing, romance scams, etc. You get to understand what it looks like in today’s world and how the criminals are evolving based on whatever roadblocks have been thrown in their way.”

 

Making sure ‘everyone is playing by the rules’

By the time she completed her certificate, McLester had moved up from an analyst to a supervisor managing a team of 10 students. When a Trust and Safety team from LinkedIn came to the lab to learn about its work, McLester got to meet them and talk about her projects. Trust and Safety teams work to keep members of a digital platform safe, “to make sure everyone is playing by the rules” and investigating when trouble arises, McLester said. “I fell in love with what they do.” She needed an internship to complete the certificate program, and even though it was a fairly new team that had never had an intern, “I asked, and they decided to open one up,” she said.

At the end of the summer, in which she traveled several times to LinkedIn’s Silicon Valley offices but mainly worked from home, McLester was offered a full-time job. She is the only Trust and Safety team member in Alabama, part of a group that is always on call to protect the network. “Our team is never asleep,” McLester said. “There’s always someone awake and working so that there are eyes on the platform 24 hours a day.”

Other recent graduates have gone on to similarly high-profile jobs at Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook, Walker said. This is a good time to specialize in digital security. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that there are 300,000 cybersecurity jobs needing to be filled. Graduates like McLester, with both classroom training and hands-on experience on their resumes, are highly sought after. LinkedIn was willing to incorporate in Alabama solely to make the arrangement work, Walker noted. “They really wanted Laura.”

 

Alabama and cybercrime

Alabama ranks #29 nationally in total losses by victim and #23 in number of victims, according to cases reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2018.

The leading cause of financial losses to cybercrime in Alabama, as it is nationally, is “business email compromise / email account compromise,” in which scammers take control of a victim’s accounts in order to make wire transfers to themselves or their associates. Here are the top five crime types by victim loss (with number of victims making reports in parentheses) as reported to the IC3 this past year for Alabama and for the nation as a whole. (For definitions of each crime type, see here.)

Alabama

  1. Business email compromise/email account compromise – $7.54 million (190 victims)
  2. Non-payment/non-delivery – $2.65 million (718 victims)
  3. Advance fee – $2.21 million (193 victims)
  4. Confidence fraud/romance – $1.79 million (235 victims)
  5. Lottery/sweepstakes/inheritance – $985,000 (94 victims)

United States totals

  1. Business email compromise/email account compromise – $1.29 billion
  2. Confidence fraud/romance – $362 million
  3. Investment – $252 million
  4. Non-payment/non-delivery – $183 million
  5. Real estate/rental – $149 million

 

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