UMD and Sourcefire Announce New Cybersecurity Partnership

The University of Maryland (UMD) and Sourcefire, Inc. (Sourcefire) today announced a new partnership to establish collaborative activities in cybersecurity.

The partnership will promote cybersecurity education, research, and student engagement through the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2). MC2 and Sourcefire will leverage each other’s resources, expertise, and unique perspectives to develop innovative cybersecurity expertise, educational opportunities and research-driven solutions to cybersecurity challenges.

"We are extremely excited to develop this new partnership with Sourcefire"

Dr. Michael Hicks, Director of Maryland Cybersecurity Center

"We are extremely excited to develop this new partnership with Sourcefire," said Dr. Michael Hicks, Director of MC2 and Associate Professor of Computer Science. "Sourcefire is a unique and impressive company that can both meet the security demands of today and perform the cutting edge research to attack the growing problems of tomorrow. We look forward to partnering together to forge innovative, game-changing solutions," added Dr. Hicks.

MC2 is forging alliances and partnerships between academia, industry and government to deliver advanced educational programs that will prepare the cybersecurity workforce of today and tomorrow.

"This represents the fourteenth corporate partnership for the Maryland Cybersecurity Center," said Eric Chapman, associate director of MC2. "The growing cadre of corporate partners we have speaks to the diverse, high caliber faculty that we have engaged in meaningful cybersecurity research, as well as to the talented undergraduates we have here at UMD." Chapman noted that since September 2011, MC2 has added nine new corporate partnerships, demonstrating a "remarkable period of growth in the relationships it is has developed with external constituencies."

UMD researchers are applying their expertise in a number of critical cybersecurity fields, including, secure software, supply chain risk management, wireless and network security, attacker behavioral analysis, and the economics of cybersecurity. MC2 stresses comprehensive solutions to cybersecurity education, research, and technology development by bringing together experts from computer science, engineering, social sciences, economics and public policy to establish interdisciplinary cybersecurity initiatives.

"At Sourcefire, we recognize the importance of creating education programs that arm our community as well as our future cybersecurity leaders with the tools and research to protect their current and future environments," said Marc Solomon, chief marketing officer for Sourcefire. "UMD has a unique approach in this regard with its MC2 initiatives, and we are quite pleased to partner with them in this program."

Designed to deliver Agile Security™, Sourcefire’s portfolio of intelligent cybersecurity solutions includes: the industry’s most effective Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), delivering advanced threat protection with real-time contextual awareness and intelligent security automation and optional application control and URL filtering; the only Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) to combine a NGIPS with integrated application control and firewall functionality in a universal high-performance appliance; the FireAMP™ enterprise-class advanced malware analysis and protection solution that uses 'big data' to discover, understand and block advanced malware outbreaks; and FireAMP Mobile to protect against mobile malware.