��������

In one exercise last year, students in Western Washington University’s new cybersecurity program set to monitoring data on the networks of five local governments: San Juan and Stevens counties and the cities of Anacortes, Washougal and Covington. The idea was the students would track the data through sensors on those networks and report on what they’d find.

“Our worry when we first started them doing this was our students would get bored and there’d be nothing interesting to find on there,” said Dr. Erik Fretheim, who runs the program. “So far we’ve found quite a few things on there.”