A two-day event has brought 400 people to Augusta for what sounds like a meeting for fans of Marvel Universe movies.
AvengerCon IX is underway at the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Training Center. It started in 2016 as a small event at Fort Meade, Md. As it grew it moved off post, ultimately coming to Augusta in 2024.
At its core, it is a training event to help understand the hacker culture and learn techniques of the so-called hacker “black hats,” individuals who break into computer systems with malicious intent. It features panel discussions, hacker villages, and training workshops.
1LT Andrew White, Cyber Capabilities Developer with the 781st Military Intelligence Battalion, told ABD that hacker culture is homegrown in civilian life. AvengerCon brings together volunteers who want to learn how it emerges and stop it.
“In military cyber, we get a lot of specific pipeline training. What we’re kind of lacking is the hacker culture that emerges kind of on its own,” he explained. “It’s a little bit harder to do in the military, because it’s kind of hard to build that culture.”
One challenge facing those who want to defend the cyber world is how to balance protecting both personal privacy with national security interests. A panel of experts will examine the intersection of academia, industry, and government, how they can collaborate while still protecting privacy concerns, particularly with the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI).
“We all go through extensive legal training before we take our jobs, and we all go through extensive, various title training, so that we understand the boundaries that Congress, that lawmakers, have put on what we do,” said CPT Amir Soofi, Artificial Intelligence Development Crew Leader. “And we continue to do this iteratively with industry and with the concerns of private sector communities. And we’re challenged in that our adversaries don’t have any such notions of privacy for their citizens or ours. And so, it’s a challenging environment, and we have events like this to keep exploring those questions.”
Soofi said, that while cyber security began entering the everyday lexicon in the past decade, AvengerCon’s keynote speaker, COL Daniel Ragsdale (R), was a leader in mapping out cyber threats.
“Over 20 years ago, he set up exactly that, a hacker competition at his university at West Point, and he started to get us. Before there was an Army Cyber, before there was Cyber Command, before, possibly next few years, a Cyber Force that brings the cyber elements from Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Space Force together.”
Soofi believes Augusta, with the Cyber Innovation and Training Center, is precisely situated to bring together academia, business, and military experts to learn best practices to deal with cyber attacks today and what to expect in the future. It is also a way to get information into the schools, to train the next generation of cyber defenders.
“Kids that get into it early and are interested in how things work and why they work, the way they work. Augusta has been an amazing host to Army Cyber. We could not become who we are if it wasn’t here in Augusta, its proximity both to Ford Eisenhower, obviously, and Georgia Tech in Atlanta, the amazing triangle of tech talent here, and the outreach we have here to the younger community that is the future of U.S. Cyber. I can’t imagine us anywhere but Augusta.”
More information about AvengerCon, its history, and its mission, is at https://avengercon.com.
The site includes links to videos from previous AvengerCon events that are posted on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) website.
