CEDARVILLE, Ohio — Students at Cedarville University worked on projects to prepare to make the tech world more secure in the future.

Aaron Campbell, a senior at Cedarville University, worked to make some last-minute tweaks to his final project. 

He tried to show the flaw in a small device being planted behind a network firewall and how it can affect the operation of a small business. 

“Being able to plant a small device that allows somebody to have a reverse connection into the internal network of a business and then that would allow them to do password attacks on all kinds of different machines on the network,” said Campbell. “It would allow them to try to pivot other machines that are running on the network.”

A visiting professor who Campbell called the “hacker in residence,” Ben Sprague, challenged Campbell to take on the project. Campbell is working toward a degree in cyber operations.

Sprague, a graduate of Cedarville University, brought his own skills and knowledge to help students be prepared to solve the problems of tomorrow. 

“We always kind of expect attackers to use fancy new dark magic techniques to do hacking and to be honest, they mostly just send you phishing emails and get you to type your password into a Google forms,” said Sprague. 

Multiple students had projects to make technology more secure.

“So this is my senior design project that I worked on with my team where we are reverse engineering a tile,” said Madeline Chairvolotti, a senior student. “So a tile tracker like this that you can put on your keys, so that way if you lose your keys, you’re able to ring it and you’ll be able to find them easier. And so what we’re doing is, we’re opening it up, looking at the firmware and seeing if we can find any vulnerabilities.”

Campbell, a Kansas native, plans to graduate in May, and he’s hopeful after getting the seal of approval from Sprague that he can move on to bigger goals in his future. 

“Ideally, I want to be doing some kind of offensive cyber job, possibly with the government,” said Campbell. “It’s very important because even with the current conflicts we’re seeing in the world, cyberattacks, and the risk of cyberattacks is constantly going up.”