Accomplishments

Security Center Accomplishments  

Shared Responsibility and Transparency 

• Established a governance structure with the Security Center Advisory Board (SCAB) made of representative from across the state
• Identified and funded state-wide solutions to address security gaps including technical and skills gap

System Wide Support 

• Funding MS A5
• Funding Sentinel as a SIEM
• BitSight EASM/TPRM
• Udemy Learning Platform
• System Wide Assessments funded
• vCISO Services
• Developing standard policy templates
• Partnerships and representation
• Chief Information Systems Officers Associations (CISOA)
• California Department of Technology (CDT)
• California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC)
• ISC2 Advocacy Members Advisory Council
• Provided outreach and professional development opportunities to upskill IT staff on all campuses, including offering Udemy role-based training access (950 employees have access so far), offering Security Center-covered CISOA registration for 61 out of 73 Districts, and a monthly training schedule on security-centered topics.
• Leveraging state and federal partnerships to advocate at larger scales, including appointment to the Office of the Govenor Operations, California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC) and the International Informaion System Security Certification Consortium (ISC2) Advocacy Member Advisory Group (AMAG); expanding supporting partnership with the California Department of Technology (CDT) Security Operations Center, and selection as a participant at 2 sessions of the 2026 EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity and Privacy Professional Conference, including the opening general session.

• The CCC Security Center's student SOC is an 8-student team dedicated to strengthening information security and advancing security operations initiatives statewide, supporting the largest higher education system in the state - 116 colleges across 73 districts.
• Delivered 15+ vulnerability reports to Districts in the last 8 months using Bitsight to evaluate District infrastructure, share critical insights, and identify action steps to address them.
• The student team monitors the existing threat landscape for cybersecurity, identifies vulnerabilities and exploits that might impact the system, and sends system-wide notifications to let colleges know what concerns may impact them. In the first 9 months of the program, the team has sent 15+ security notifications to districts on known threats.
• After notifications are sent, the student SOC team also identifies which Districts are a critical risk and works with them to improve. In more than 4 cases, they identified a potential active threat they helped Districts address.
• 2 previous student interns from the first cohort recently accepted roles at Disney and Merrill Lynch.