Meagan Hampel

SniffPass boosts US infrastructure cybersecurity

Last year, we wrote about a novel security tool that Cybera’s security team had made open source. The “plaintext password sniffer,” or SniffPass, was first developed by the University of Alberta’s security team to detect and secure their institution against phishing attempts or insecure online passwords. Cybera’s security analyst made SniffPass available in Zeek, a […]

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City of Calgary becomes first municipality in Alberta to offer eduroam

The City of Calgary has become only the second municipality in Canada to offer eduroam (education roaming), a global internet access service for the higher education and research sector. This means any staff or students from any eduroam-connected organization — including local post-secondary institutions as well as ones from around the world — can automatically

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Advice for Alberta institutions looking to make use of a Shared CISO

For the last two years, Cybera has facilitated a Shared Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) program for its members. The origin of this program dates back to 2017, when Norquest College and Lakeland College teamed up to share a single CISO: security expert Curtis Blais, who remains the Shared CISO today.  Having a Shared CISO

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Cybera has joined the NLNOG RING: a global tool for network testing (and debugging)

Last fall, Cybera joined the NLNOG RING, a global community of network operators that enables fast network debugging. The RING platform essentially provides a trusted network of virtual machines, allowing individual operators to quickly run tests and analyses to pinpoint routing issues. Cybera is one of only a handful of Canadian network operators that have

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University of Alberta sees many upsides after switching to IPv6

In 2018, the University of Alberta switched its wifi to IPv6 (internet protocol version 6). Raymond Richmond, Team Lead for IST at the University, talks about his experience with becoming IPv6-enabled, and the benefits that have come with making the change. (One of the biggest benefits right now is being able to offer a more

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Edmonton Public Library becomes first public institution in Alberta to offer eduroam

This summer, the Edmonton Public Library (EPL) became the first non-post-secondary education institution in Alberta to offer eduroam, a world-wide roaming internet access service. This means any staff or students from an eduroam-connected institution — such as NAIT, the University of Alberta, MacEwan University, and Concordia University of Edmonton — who have eduroam set up

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The ties that bind Alberta’s tech administrators

Between May 2019 and February 2020, Cybera held a series of half-day round table sessions in Red Deer, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie, Edmonton and Calgary. Our goal was to review the digital resources currently being used by Alberta’s public and education sectors to create efficiencies and improve computational literacy. We also wanted to identify existing gaps.

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Creating a federation of global computers for science and research

Cybera’s Rapid Access Cloud is a small contributor to a global chain of compute nodes, brought together by the Open Science Grid to support science projects. A computer cluster is when several “tightly connected” computers are made to work on a project together, essentially creating a single system. These clusters are a great means of

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Alberta group models CO2 injection system off the coast of Canada

The dangers of a warming Earth caused by climate change are well documented. Scientists around the world agree: if we are to maintain the health (and even survival) of millions of plants and animal species around the world, we need to cap our carbon emissions now. While reducing overall carbon emissions is the ultimate goal

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Alberta-led project seeks to detect powerful neutrinos off the coast of BC

“They’re messengers of the most interesting things that happen in the Universe.” This is how Dr. Carsten B. Krauss, Director of the Centre for Particle Physics at the University of Alberta, describes high-energy neutrinos. “Neutrinos come from the explosions of stars, and possibly from other sources, like the environment around black holes,” says Krauss. “What’s

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Improving access to clean water around the world through machine learning

In 2018, Cybera’s Data Science for Albertans team partnered with local startup Synauta on a two-week pilot. At the time, founder Dr. Mike Dixon shared an office space with Cybera, and we learned about his new company over conversations in the shared kitchen. We jointly realized there was an opportunity to trial the use of

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UPDATED – free resources available during COVID-19

Cybera has been notified of more tools and services being made available to education and public organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have further questions about a specific offering, please contact us at info@cybera.ca, and we can direct you to the vendor for more information. Cybera Vendor CIRA CIRA Canadian Shield: Free DNS service to protect

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Open source “password sniffer” fights back against online phishing

The Canadian Security Information and Event Management initiative, which launched in 2019, has brought together security analysts from across the National Research and Education Network (NREN) to share information and best practices, and collaborate on new cybersecurity tools. One of the more interesting tools they recently implemented was from an idea that came out of

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Alberta cloud resource supports local charity that diverts edible food from the landfill

The Leftovers Foundation is one of Western Canada’s largest food rescue charities. Based in Calgary and Edmonton, the organization works with local restaurants, bakeries and grocers to redirect edible food that is headed to the landfill towards those who need it most. This rescued food helps service agencies such as the Calgary Drop-In Centre, Calgary

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