Four Days, Two Dogs, One Bunny—And a Cybersecurity Dream Job

Cyber competitions, industry connections, and a full-ride scholarship offered through LSU enabled cybersecurity graduate Brennen Calato from Mandeville, Louisiana, to turn a dream internship at Idaho National Laboratory into a dream job.

It took four days of driving with his wife, two dogs, and a bunny in a Honda Civic for Brennen Calato to move from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Idaho Falls, Idaho, this summer to start his new job as a cybersecurity researcher at Idaho National Laboratory. The tough drive was a… surprise, but the team he joined was not. Last summer, Calato worked there as one of six LSU interns defending electric vehicles and EV chargers from cyberattacks, developing AI, and more.

“We did preemptive defense by trying to exploit the electric vehicle systems so things can be fixed before someone else does it for worse reasons,” Calato said. “Everyone I worked with was amazing, and I’d actually met my current manager the year before, playing bocce ball in a bar.”

It wasn’t any bar. It was the hotel bar of the Gaylord Hotel in Washington, DC, during the annual National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) job fair, where students from more than a hundred schools get the chance to informally and formally interview for the most competitive cyber internships and jobs in the nation, meeting with government agencies and industry. Despite being relatively new to the program—LSU received its first CyberCorps award from the National Science Foundation in 2020 and has been awarded $3.6 million to date as one of the fastest-growing cyber schools—LSU sends some of the largest cohorts to the job fair. All SFS students receive full-ride scholarships for up to three years in return for equal-time government service (paid, of course) after graduation. As many as 13 LSU cyber students have graduated with 31 more in the pipeline.

“We talked for a while in the bar and then again at the job fair the next day,” Calato said. “It was a great networking opportunity.”

The job fair was not the only time Calato met representatives, now colleagues, from the national labs, which are primarily focused on American energy security. He participated in capture-the-flag events and represented LSU at annual Department of Energy CyberForce Competitions and several National Security Agency (NSA) Codebreaker Challenges.

“CyberForce is in-person and focused on critical infrastructure scenarios, like a red-team, blue-team thing where volunteers from the national labs like INL and Oak Ridge come in and participate to test your ability to respond to a breach,” Calato said. “Then the NSA competition—I started doing that my senior year of undergrad. It’s usually eight or nine challenges you work on for several months. LSU had six students doing it in 2022, 49 in 2023, and 75 last year—just to tell you how much LSU’s cyber program has grown and how good the students are.”

Learning hands-on and first-hand was one of Calato’s main reasons for choosing to study cybersecurity at LSU.

“I was originally going into the physics program because LSU has an amazing physics program— that was my intention,” Calato said. “But I swapped to computer science because I didn’t want to go to graduate school, which is ironic because I did that anyway, which I guess means I loved it. I always want to learn as much as possible.”

Calato’s biggest takeaways from studying cyber at LSU are the highly technical classes in malware analysis and reverse engineering as well as in software vulnerabilities and exploitation.

“One of the best perks of LSU and the Applied Cybersecurity Lab, in my opinion, is access to LSU industry liaison Andrew Case. He’s one of the lead developers of Volatility, the memory forensics framework, and passes a lot of work off to us students where we’re able to contribute meaningfully to the field.”

Brennen Calato, LSU cybersecurity alumnus

Calato ended up doing his master’s thesis with Case and Professor Golden Richard, developing two Volatility plugins to help secure Microsoft’s web server Internet Information Services (IIS).

“IIS is module-based, and what’s becoming very apparent is malicious actors are starting to upload their own modules to these web servers to create backdoors,” Calato said. “The plugins I developed help detect them.”

“That was one of the main reasons I joined the Applied Cybersecurity Lab at LSU,” Calato continued. “We have to constantly learn and find new things, get better, because cyber is almost like an arms race when it comes to things like defending critical infrastructure. Every time you make a move, attackers find something new. It’s an endless circle—it will never be done, and that’s why research is so important.”

To learn more about cybersecurity and the SFS program at LSU, visit lsu.edu/cybersecurity.

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