On 14 November, NCI Agency colleagues Janusz Piatek (CSSC Brunssum) and Richard Mulqueen (CSU Ramstein) were amongst the first graduates of the NATO School Cyber Security Program. The programme was developed and taught by the Naval Postgraduate School located in Monterey, California and hosted at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. The two colleagues attended the program that was filled with NATO personnel, Partnership for Peace, Mediterranean Dialogue and national staff with a variety of backgrounds.
The program course work contained four cyber security classes: Network Security Course, Network Vulnerability Assessment & Risk Mitigation Course, Incident Handling & Disaster Recovery Course and Network Traffic Analysis Course. The programme was 40 weeks in length including 8 total weeks on site in Oberammergau and 32 weeks of distant learning. The classwork consisted of numerous lab activities in house as well as across 10 time zones via the NPS portal. Upon the completion of each course, every student was required to take a final examination to test the knowledge acquired after those 10 weeks.
During the programme, students took several certification examinations with the EC COUNCIL which included: Certified Ethical Hacker, Certified Incident Handler and Disaster Recovery in Virtualization Technology or Business Continuity Planning. In addition to the three listed commercial certifications, they earned two official certificates from the US National Security Agency (NSA) in Systems Administration and Information Security Risk Analyst.