Students Battle Hackers on the Cybersecurity Front Lines

In the decades he’s spent combating human trafficking, Austin Shamlin has developed an expert’s understanding of the gruesome business of kidnapping and enslaving people. He’s seen horrors such as women held prisoner in brothels in the Dominican Republic, girls confined to cages in Haiti and predators at the Polish-Ukrainian border circling women and children fleeing the war. But the former cop knows less about shielding himself and the group he helms, an anti-trafficking nonprofit called the Traverse Project, from hackers.

After being quoted almost $300,000 for security software, Shamlin turned to an unexpected source for help: the University of California at Berkeley. This fall a dozen or so students will put together a cybersecurity strategy to counter growing threats from the criminal gangs his group pursues. “We have to assume these networks have similar resources to track us as we do them, if not better,” Shamlin says. He expects the team, he says, “to come up with the craziest ideas to keep my people safe.”